


like the way you burn

by Irony_Rocks



Series: Soulmarks [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, BAMF Peggy Carter, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The First Avenger, Cap!Peggy, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, OTP: true, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, time-traveling schenanigans, written originally intended as smut but somehow grew plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:07:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 61,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23688904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irony_Rocks/pseuds/Irony_Rocks
Summary: Soulmate mark AU. Peggy thinks about the mark, the compass. She thinks about the providence behind its appearance alongside Project Rebirth. It's only the beginning to a series of events destined to change her life and the fate of the future.[...or, in the alternative, Peggy Carter becomesCaptain Britain.]
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Peggy Carter, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Series: Soulmarks [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800769
Comments: 148
Kudos: 256





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>   
>   
> Feel free to follow me at my [FormerlyIR tumblr](https://formerlyir.tumblr.com).

  
The moment he drops out of the chamber, she knows something is amiss.  
  
It’s an observation anyone would make, especially when seeing an asthmatic malnourished man enter and a man nothing short of an Adonis emerge. Even Peggy gets caught up momentarily by the fetching sight, all muscles and limbs glistening brightly, enticing enough to make a girl reach out foolishly to touch _– almost_. She scarcely stops herself from making contact, from making a complete fool of herself, hovering an inch above his pectorals before snatching back her hand in embarrassment.  
  
But she meant something else was amiss. She meant – something about _her_ – was amiss. Muddled. She felt peculiar, changed, in a way she couldn’t yet describe.  
  
But then there was a burst of gunfire.  
  
Like that, a fingersnap, the moment to reflect shatters.  
  
Ershine takes a hit, a good man dying after his greatest achievement. Peggy is the first to chase the gunman through the lab, back towards the bustling streets. The assassin escapes into a car, racing down toward her. Feet planted firmly in place, she doesn’t flinch. Aims, hands steady, and pulls the trigger.  
  
Steve pushes her out of the way, at the last second.  
  
It isn’t the completely unnecessary save that annoys her. It’s that she had him, the assassin, right in her crosshairs.  
  
“Sorry!” he blurts out, tripping over his own legs as he takes off again.  
  


#

  
With Erskine dead and the super-soldier formula lost, the SSR is ordered to join the war and engage HYDRA on the warfront. There weren’t scores of female operatives in the field. The few that were worked mostly as secretaries (filing orders, dispatching calls, bringing coffee) or spies (handling weaponry, organizing munitions and supplies drops, breaking code). Peggy isn’t sure what her next assignment will be, but Philips assures her it won’t include typing.  
  
To her surprise, though, Steve isn’t afforded the same break.  
  
“A glorified PR stunt,” Philips tells her. “The only result of all of Erskine’s work. What a _waste!”_  
  
She doesn’t comment, but she doesn’t agree either.  
  
It isn’t until later, when she’s packing up to go, light and efficient, changing into fatigues, that she sees the mark under her collarbone. Pale and hazy around the edges, a locket, a compass of some sort – she thinks she’s imagining it at first, because it’s outlandish that it appears after all these years.  
  
People get the mark at childbirth, or when their soulmate is born. She never had her mark. Never even felt the grief of missing it. Not everyone had one, after all. It was rare these days. The few that did were considered fortunate to ever meet the individual with the matching mark, the one destined to be a soulmate. Fewer, even, that’d come to realize it, because you had to touch the other person, skin on skin contact, setting off that irrefutable moment of clarity. The moment of a soulmate epiphany. Peggy stares at the mark in disbelief, rubbing the compass as if it was only ink and nothing at all life-altering. She sits heavily on the bed, confounded.  
  
Why, today of all days, would it appear?  
  
Just how bloody much older is she than her soulmate?  
  


#

  
She puts it out of sight, out of mind, covering up with extra layers and ignoring all implications. There’s a war to be fought. She isn’t some lovestruck schoolgirl with nothing better to do than daydream about a man – or woman – sweeping her off her feet. Never mind if the individual is young enough to be her child. The indignity of it isn’t worth mentioning to anyone.  
  
She sees Steve sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, a plate of food left forgotten in front of him as he scans the newspaper on transpiring events. The battle in El Alamein has ramped up; Sevastopol is falling to the Germans; the marked end of Red Army resistance in the Crimea.  
  
“Shouldn’t you be eating?” Peggy declares as a greeting, seating herself opposite him. “I imagine your metabolism is running amuck. You should be eating enough for a sporting team.”  
  
Steve shakes his head, folding the paper in half. “Lost my appetite.”  
  
She stares, catching his crestfallen face, and knows Philips’ less than thrilling orders have reached his ears. “Give it time,” she tells him. “There’s plenty of ways to help the war effort. I imagine there’s plenty you could teach the scientists.”  
  
“I didn’t sign up to be a lab rat.”  
  
“Yes,” she counters. “You did. You knew as well as anybody that Project Rebirth could have left you invalid, or worse. Instead, you’re charitably a marvel of human creation.”  
  
His ears tip red at that, and she imagines, with the way he looks now, his threshold for flattery and embarrassment is going to have to improve dramatically. She wasn’t even trying to make him blush.  
  
“I just never imagined being left behind again,” he gestures to himself with a loathing wave, “especially looking like this.”  
  
She sighs. “Steve, you have nothing to prove to anyone. You did more than your duty by stepping into that chamber. Erskine’s men just want to see if they can replicate what he did with you.”  
  
He stares at her for a bit, silent, then says, “All due respect, you have nothing to prove to anyone either. If it were you being left behind, what would your reaction be?”  
  
He has her there, quite perceptively.  
  
It’s one of things that attracted her to him, actually. Even before the experiment and anyone with eyes found him striking. He’d been a slight man, but he’d had more personality and intelligence than any three men next to him, and she’d found that enticing. She knew what it was like to be overlooked and ignored. His perceived slight had been his stature – hers, a gender.  
  
She softens her voice, “This isn’t the end, Steve. This war, heaven forbid, is going to last a great deal longer than either of us wants. You’ll have the opportunity to prove yourself every bit of the man that Erskine hoped you’d be.”  
  
“You really think I can make a difference in a lab?”  
  
“For the moment,” Peggy allows. “Until better things come along. I believe you’re meant for more than this, Steve. You just have to be patient.”  
  
Steve still doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he doesn’t look so resigned either. Before he can respond, someone is calling for Peggy across the hall.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, parting. “Until we meet again?”  
  
He nods.  
  
For a moment, she wants to reach out and press a hand to his, a gesture of solidarity, of friendship, but there are eyes all around her. The last thing she needs is rumors spreading. So, she nods back and turns away, only looking once over her shoulder. Steve is watching her the entire time, and she can’t label it, that feeling again, a nameless sense of aberration. It passes once she exits the room, and once she leaves, Peggy puts her best foot forward and carries on.  
  


#

  
It almost isn’t the scientists that get their hooks into him. The politicians take their whack at him first, trying to recruit him into a gaggle of USO girls, the poster boy for the war.  
  
For whatever reason, Steve declines.  
  
She doesn’t hear about him for a time, because it’s like he disappears into the ether. She suspects that Colonel Philips receives updates from time to time, but he never mentions Steve, and Peggy can’t come up with a justifiable enough reason to ask. A part of her is relieved he didn’t go on tour with the USO girls, for admittedly silly reasons. Peggy hears the radio and watches the newsreels as well as anybody else, and it’d be a bit puerile, to make a dancing mockery of a man who jumped on a live grenade to save others.  
  
In any case, Peggy has her hands full. The 107th infantry regiment goes missing off the border of Italy; two hundred men had left for the German front, and only fifty returned. The SSR is brought in to provide logistical back up, a way to re-strategize a losing game. Philips thinks it’s already a lost battle, though.  
  
It isn’t until the following month, when Peggy’s company is almost ready to leave the deluge of Italy, bitterly unsuccessful, that Steve reappears again. Surprisingly, Howard Stark is right behind him.  
  
“Sir,” Steve says, approaching Philips. “I heard the 107th was bogged down.”  
  
Philips looks up, barely a glance. “Well, if isn’t the lab rat. Your intel is old. Most of the 107th was declared KIA last week. I sent out more condolence letters than I cared to count.”  
  
Steve’s face has a pale, determined look on it. “I know, sir. You wrote one for a friend of mine.”  
  
Philips pauses, the briefest of sympathy, before a hard mask falls again. “So, to what do I owe the displeasure of this visit, then?”  
  
“I think I can help,” Steve declares, “for the remaining men.”  
  
Behind him, Howard Stark pipes up. “You should let him try. The things this guy can do, it’s unbelieva—”  
  
“I’m not interested in more scientific baloney,” Philips cuts in. “The SSR wasted years following that line.”  
  
Peggy steps forward. “Sir,” she says, and Steve turns to see her for the first time, face registering surprise and then something else. “Perhaps we should at least hear him out. We’ve run out of options. No strategy we’ve tried has made a dent in rescuing those men.”  
  
“Those men are thirty miles behind the enemy line,” Philips retorts. “We’d lose more men than we’d save.”  
  
Philips dismisses them quicker than they have time to make an appeal, but Peggy sees Steve, sees him eye the map on the wall, the HYDRA pins near Grossglockner and Kitzbühel, and knows with an alarming certainty what he’s going to do.  
  
It’s what Peggy would do, if she’d been given his strengths.  
  
She follows Steve to one of the armories, sees him load up on weapons and ammunition. “Steve, I know what you’re thinking.”  
  
“Then you know there’s no point in stopping me,” he returns, storming out of the tent.  
  
He starts loading a single jeep, fully intent on charging a HYDRA camp with nothing more than he can carry. He straightens when he sees her standing in the rain, drenched like a rat. A second later, he’s removing his green coat to throw over her shoulders, but she ignores it, trying to get through to him before he does something reckless and irreversible. He’ll never make it through the rough terrain and enemy lines in a jeep. He’ll die trying.  
  
“You told me you thought I was meant for more than this,” Steve says. “Did you mean it?”  
  
“Every word,” she returns. “And I think I can help you do better than a straight run into enemy lines, too.”  
  


#

  
Commissioning a Beechcraft Model 18 plane isn’t hard to do when she’s known to have Colonel Philips’ seal of approval on base. Stark turns out to be decent pilot, and Steve is so eager to mount the rescue that he doesn’t question the plan until they’re already in the air, eyeing the small black tracker she’d obtained with skepticism.  
  
“You know you’re going to be in a lot of trouble when you land,” Steve says.  
  
“And you won’t?” she returns.  
  
“Well, where I’m going, if anyone yells at me, I can just shoot ‘em.”  
  
“They will undoubtedly shoot back,” she archly replies.  
  
Which is when Stark starts flirting, talking about a great fondue place in Lucerne. Peggy restrains a dramatic eyeroll, just barely. Steve is eyeing both of them, a look of thinly concealed curiosity on his face, and perhaps even a hint of jealousy. Peggy has to fight the urge to correct his assumptions – both Howard and Steve’s – before it goes any further. But she can’t be bothered with rejecting every man that flirts with her. She’d have done nothing else since joining the army.  
  
Instead, she changes the subject. “I take it you too came together in the States?” she says to Steve. “He was instrumental in Erskine’s work. It’d make sense he’d want to continue it.”  
  
Steve nods. “He’s not so bad, once you get past his bluster.”  
  
“What bluster?” Howard shouts from the cockpit. “I’m a 100% the real thing!”  
  
They’re supposed to fly for at least another twenty minutes, but they start taking fire before they reach the destination. Steve grabs his shield and gun, telling her to turn the plane around after he jumps.  
  
“You can’t give me orders!” she shouts at him, over the rushing wind.  
  
“The hell I can’t!” he says, pulling on his googles, smiling. “I’m a captain!”  
  
Just before he jumps out, just before he dives into a sky of brimfire and chaos, Peggy catches it. Just a glimpse. His dog tags, with a soulmate designation mark in the corner, a thing used to denote he had a guaranteed match in blood and organs. He’s gone almost quicker than a blink of an eye, falling into enemy territory, and Peggy is left standing there with a growing sense of that anomaly in the pit of her stomach, something low and primal.  
  


#

  
  
Steve didn’t have a soulmark before; she is positive of that. Peggy would have discovered that when she’d been part of the vetting team selecting the Project Rebirth candidate. It was one of the things that worked in Steve’s favor, because Country and Flag needed to be his topmost priority.  
  
But she’d seen the mark there, on his dog tags, almost mocking her.  
  
“Howard,” she says, delicately, when they’ve cleared the firefight. “What have you learned about Steve since the experiment?”  
  
“A lot,” he answers, eagerly. “He can run a mile in two minutes flat. Skin density is through the roof, I think he could withstand a bullet. We still haven’t hit the upper limits of what he can do.”  
  
“Right,” she says, still steadying the pitch of her voice. “And there haven’t been any other aberrations? Other than his strength?”  
  
“Like what? Healing? Yeah, he’s got that too. And it isn’t just the muscles and blood affected by the super soldier serum. It altered brain chemistry, amplified personality traits. I think that’s why the guy’s morality code can’t see in shades of gray. He just sees right and wrong. I once tried to get him to play hookie for a night out at a casino. He wouldn’t even budge when I mentioned the twins I wanted to bring along!”  
  
Peggy isn’t surprised by that. It was this amplification of personality that led Erskine to choose him as a test subject in the first place.  
  
“What about …” she pauses, unable to voice it aloud, too preposterous. Too extreme. How can she discreetly ask whether Captain America has a soulmark without sounding juvenile? “Never mind.”  
  
When they make it back to base, Philips is waiting for her. She endures the seething tirade without protest, knowing full well if it were anyone else in her position, she’d be in the brigade already. He’s always had a soft spot for her, even if she may have wrecked it permanently with this stunt.  
  
“All this, because you had a crush,” Philips declares.  
  
“It wasn’t that,” Peggy retorts. “It was faith.”  
  
“Faith?” Philips repeats. “Your faith may have shut down this entire division.”  
  
Everyone avoids her after that, a virtual pariah. Stark is too rich and too valuable to discipline, but to most, Peggy has always been seen as a liability, like low hanging fruit on loan from MI5. Peggy squares her shoulders and ignores the looks. Unfortunately for her, her new pariah status means she doesn’t have access to Steve’s files anymore, not even when she implies that she has higher-up authority.  
  
She doesn’t regret one moment of the insubordination, not if it gave those men a fighting chance at survival. But the rendezvous timeline comes and goes, and there’s nothing but silence over the radio and the tracking equipment. Days turn into weeks, and the higher-ups grow restless as the fate of their golden boy turns murky, but not as restless as Peggy.  
  
Uncertainty begins to bloom deep in her chest.  
  
On the day they’re set to proclaim Steve Rogers MIA, Peggy scours the aerial surveillance, searching for a sign of any activity. She waits by the telegraph, decoding the messages herself until it runs dry for the day. She reads the intelligence briefs of the region, over and over, hoping for the lines to miraculously change. But when Philips tells her to retrieve Rogers’ personnel file so he can inform the next of kin, Peggy feels the claws of defeat closing in around her chest.  
  
In a backroom filled with cabinets and day-old coffee, she dismisses the personnel there, and for once since this whole ordeal began, they obey, catching onto her mood.  
  
She opens a file marked “eyes only.”  
  
The accompanying paperwork is more redacted than not, at least two-thirds blocked out by black marker. She reads his birthday and blood type, both of which she already knew. She glosses over his bio-history, a cornucopia of ailments and diseases: chronic colds, high blood pressure, palpitations, general heart trouble, asthma, anxiety, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever… the list goes on.  
  
She knows this information already. She flips to the back, among family information, where she sees both parents listed as deceased. His mother, from cancer. His father, from mustard gas.  
  
However, under marital status, it’s changed since the last time she’d read Steve’s file. It now lists “Soulmark formed 1943, undeclared.”  
  
She feels her breath start to shake.  
  
A series of pictures of Steve are paperclipped to the back cover. In it, she sees skinny, sweet Steve, medical pictures of him in various stages of undress. A medical examination marks each notable attribute – an old fracture on his left tibia, the scars on his chest, from boyhood beatings, other ailments and defects. Then there lay assembled another set of pictures – of Steve after the serum, noting all the differences. Physique, medical markers, a chart of his enlargements. The last picture in the file is the one she’s looking for: a close up of the front of his left thigh, where the soulmark is present: a compass, one matching her own.  
  
She brushes her fingers over it, feeling feverish. She thinks back to the taxi-ride to Erskine’s laboratory that fateful day, the talk about partners and dancing.  
  
The right partner.  
  
If it’s true, she wonders what possessed the universe to deny this man her mark until he stumbled out of Erskine’s chamber. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. She thinks about the mark, the compass. She thinks about the providence behind its appearance alongside Project Rebirth. She thinks, feeling ill, she may have sent her soulmate to his death before she’d even touched him, even once.  
  


#

  
Steve comes traipsing through the front gates, the masses of the 107th behind him.  
  
It takes all her willpower not to reach for him, it really does. Philips, for once, has no reprimand on his lips, just a quiet look that is, if you knew him very well, the signs of satisfaction. She waits for him to leave before she marches up to Steve, barely restraining herself from touching him. Because he’s whole and alive, and that smile in his eyes as he presents the broken tracker has just the barest hints of pride.  
  
Earlier, she’d told Philips she didn’t regret any of her actions, not one bit. But the truth is, there is one regret. She would like to feel that moment of charge, that undeniable spark that poets wax eternal about, when two soulmates first touch. With a man as good as Steve, as decent, she wonders what it would be like.  
  
The men around start cheering for Captain America.  
  
The entire time, Steve and Peggy stare at each other like there’s no one else around.  
  


#

  
  
Later on, she starts flirting with him a bit shamelessly.  
  
“This one was near Poland, one near the Baltic, and the sixth one was about…” he marks a spot on the map, “here – thirty, forty miles west of the Maginot Line. I just got a quick look.”  
  
Peggy lifts an eyebrow. “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she says sighing.  
  
She swears Steve visibly puffs up his chest in pride, then rushes to catch up with her when she moves towards the back. It’s electric, this feeling of chemistry between them. Peggy can feel the hum of anticipation every time they brush by each other, inches apart but close enough that she can smell the aftershave on him.  
  
Philips gives Steve his own command, leading a group cobbled-together of spies and prisoners of war from almost every Allied nation, a group that quickly wreaks havoc on the local taverns; Peggy suspects they’ll do a decent dent onto German-occupied Europe, too.  
  
That night, she wears a bold dress, blood red, a face painted for war for all the men it knocks off their feet. Every eye turns to her, but she only has eyes for Steve, and he sees that, staring back. She thinks, he must know, the way he looks at her, that’s she his mark. He must suspect it.  


#

Of course, as is customary in her life, any rapidly rising hope is quickly dashed by a healthy dose of reality. Because even soul mates, even something straight out of those barking mad fairytales, doesn’t match up to the reality of men – and how they’re utter wankers, the lot of them.  
  
She finds him kissing Private Lorraine behind a stack of cabinets.  
  
She puts four bullets into his shield, him cowering behind it.  
  
What can she say? Peggy has never shared well with others that which is _hers_.  
  


#

  
She’d been engaged once before, back when she’d been a codebreaker in Bletchley Park when the war began. Fred Wells had been a man nice enough, but her brother had called out the mismatched pair for what they were.  
  
Michael Carter had always seen Peggy in the clearest light, without all the constructs of society and the shackles of sexism. It was Michael who’d encouraged her to join Special Operations. It was Michael that had seen through her piteous attempts at seeming normal and traditional, a lady just like their mother wanted.  
  
She wonders what her brother would have thought of Steve Rogers. It isn’t often that Peggy makes life-altering decisions, but when she does, Michael’s voice is often in the back of her mind, whispering encouragingly. She can’t decide what Michael would have thought of her present situation, though. He had a habit, God rest his soul, of calling her out on her most obnoxious behaviors, even when – especially when – she didn’t like it. An instinct to distrust had always been one of her most unflattering qualities.  
  
“Just out of curiosity,” Barnes says to her, one day, “how long do you plan on torturing my guy?”  
  
Peggy looks up, trying to dismiss Barnes with only a look. Apparently, though, he’s gained immunity to such looks from women.  
  
“He didn’t mean it,” Barnes goes on to say. “The girl dragged him into the kiss!”  
  
“Oh yes,” Peggy says, unable to stop herself. “And we all know that Steve’s strength is easily overmatched.”  
  
Barnes flinches. “Look, I get it. It doesn’t look good. But you gotta know that isn’t Steve’s style. He’s a puppy dog you get at the shelter, forever loyal.”  
  
Peggy starts walking away.  
  
Barnes rushes to catch up. “Just give him another chance, _please_. The moping is killing me. The guy hasn’t cracked a smile in forever—”  
  
“Hyperbole isn’t going to help you win any arguments here.”  
  
“Who said I was exaggerating?” Barnes says, swinging out in front of her. She stops in her tracks, annoyed and late to a meeting, two things that ensure the beginnings of a horrid day. “C’mon, it’s you and me here. The guy can’t stop staring at you when you enter a room, like the aforementioned puppy. You know the guy is head over heels for you.”  
  
“Sargent Barnes,” she says, clipped, “while I can appreciate this endeavor to help a fellow soldier out, it is in no way your place to interfere. Kindly get out of my way.”  
  
He does, reluctantly.  
  
She isn’t more than a few feet down the aisle before he hollers out, “You’ve got his mark, don’t you?”  
  
Peggy stops dead in her tracks, completely still. She can’t give anything away, though, so with effort, she slowly continues her march out of the room.  
  
She barely hears Barnes as he sighs out, “Yeah, figured as much.”  
  


#

  
Philips sends her to the north zone of France the following month, the HYDRA-occupied zone, as a courier relaying information about German positions too sensitive to broadcast even over secured lines. She helps traffic out information, and sneak in supplies, traveling around under the pretense of a translator for a manufacturing business. It helps that she smiles politely at businessmen and patrol whenever she’s stopped, her French articulate and impeccable.  
  
She’s done far worse things, with far less pleasantries. She’s reminded of her time in Germany, smuggling in as a sickly maid, even going so far as to bite her own tongue bloody to fake tuberculosis. She’d been cast aside, a thing no one wanted to touch, which made it easy to slip in and out of occupied territories. It was on one such undertaking that she’d learned the location where Abraham Erskine had been imprisoned by Schmidt. She’d led the raid, steering Erskine into becoming an American asset.  
  
After that, Project Rebirth had been born.  
  
Her actions, it seems, had a clear hand in bringing Steve Rogers into her life. She didn’t understand it and had never really bothered before to figure it out. Fate, the universe, whatever deity one believed in – they’d all steered her into the path of Steve with that bloody soul mark. It seems disingenuous now, because she isn’t even a person that believes in fate. She is her own woman, someone who has had enough of people telling her what to do and what to think. She’s been told all her life what is meant for her, and Peggy Carter will be damned is she lets something as fickle as fate decide who she is going to fall in love with.  
  
Fate, however, likes to keep them close, or at the very least, in parallel play. When she comes back to the SSR, she finds Steve’s unit deployed to those same positions of HYDRA intel that she’d smuggled out. He comes back victorious, as always, smiling at her like he’s waiting for her approval.  
  
“Well done, Captain,” Peggy says, steely professionalism like a suit of armor.  
  
“Thanks,” he says, clearing his throat. She’s passing by, carrying a load of folders, and out of instinct he reaches for her, intending to help, but she flinches back _hard_. Enough that he quickly retreats his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t—”  
  
“I’m fine,” she snaps. “Thank you.”  
  
She disappears without looking back.  
  


#

  
  
Over the next few months, Steve and his men traipse up and down Europe, enough that the American President later credits the group with reversing the fortunes of the Allies against Hitler. Newsreels pop up, full of pro-American propaganda, and she stares at his dashing profile, more than a little annoyed at the way she can’t pull her eyes away from him. It’s ridiculous. She isn’t some damsel with a schoolgirl crush.  
  
Still, she watches all the newsreels with Steve in them, every single one.  
  
And there are a lot.  
  
Sitting in the darkened theater watching one such reel, Peggy is caught off-guard to see a compass – not their soulmark, but an _actual_ compass. She sees him sneak it into his pocket, but not before revealing a picture of her torn straight out of the newspaper.  
  
Philips sits next to her, smirking.  
  
And Peggy does all she can to keep the mortification off her face – the embarrassment, yes, but also just the tiniest hint of flattery.  
  


#

  
They regroup, on occasion – when the occasion calls for it.  
  
A HYDRA raid always calls for it. Peggy is halfway up the stairs when she encounters another HYDRA agent. Sheer brute force works to her advantage as she slams his face down onto a concrete step, blood gushing from his nose when he rises. Peggy weaves around a few blows, blocking with her elbow, swinging back around to slam a fist to his face. He drops as heavy as a bag of bricks, body collapsing against the concrete floor.  
  
To the side, Dum Dum and Barnes lay down suppressive fire. Steve runs out first and darts in a quick blur. He vaults over a table as a splattering of bullets whiz by him – and then he’s on the ground again, returning fire from underneath the table, catching each man in the thigh and the foot. Another barrage of bullets goes off, but Steve doesn’t slow down, just rushes through it like he can see faster than the bullets can fly, delivering a roundhouse kick that knocks the last HYDRA agent’s weapon away.  
  
“You okay?” Steve asks her.  
  
She nods. “Gentlemen,” Peggy addresses everyone. “Secure the facility.”  
  
It isn’t until hours later, when the dust has finally settled, that they realize what they actually have. A prize HYDRA hideout, a singular safehouse meant for Schmidt’s own personal use. The men captured turn out to be some of Schmidt’s closest men, a group expected to wait on the Red Skull hand and foot. They learn that Schmidt is recruiting again, on the hunt for scientists on par with Erskine. His latest intended asset is in Hungary, a man named Agoston.  
  
Peggy is enlisted to go, a cover story quietly assembled, invoking yet again her knack for languages as she’s given the cover of an attaché. Steve insists on the Howling Commandos escorting her over the Tatras mountains. She wants to protest, but the truth is the mountains are bitterly cold, and her doting father’s lessons of horsemanship and shooting didn’t expand to skiing. It’s the quickest way down the mountain, and Steve, like most things, is almost an Olympic-level expert in the skill.  
  


#

  
But first, they stop at a quiet Inn outside of Poland.  
  
It’s a ramshackle place, broken down and debris filled. Still, the owners quickly rush them in eagerly, insisting that the place still functions well. They just need a place to rest for the night, and the bitter cold outside makes it unagreeable to entertain a night camping, especially since they likely have many nights ahead of them where warm accommodations will be impossible.  
  
There are four rooms available, for their party of eight. The boys quickly double up on beds, grumbling about the concerning snoring habits in certain individuals (i.e. Dum Dum). It’s obvious they’re doing their best to accommodate Peggy, the only female in the contingent, at first planning on giving her a room all to her own. Peggy isn’t having any of it.  
  
“Don’t worry about me,” she tells them. She long ago realized the best way to fit in with the boys was to act like them, as much as her dignity would abide. “I can bunk up with someone.”  
  
“With who?” Barnes pipes up, amused, from the back.  
  
And Peggy feels like she’s swallowed her foot whole. Because she wants to say, _anyone other than Steve,_ but that would invite questions about her preferences, or aversions as it were, and she couldn’t have that.  
  
“Guys,” Steve cuts in, unamused. “Knock it off.”  
  
His coming to her defense only highlights her issues and makes them more obvious.  
  
“With the Captain,” she declares, flatly, with far more aplomb than she should. “If that’s all right with him. I’m sure he’ll be more of a gentleman here than you lot.”  
  
Peggy has never been one to back down from a challenge, but this, she quickly realizes, is bordering on idiocy. To her declaration, Steve looks like he’s forgotten how to form words; even Bucky looks startled. None of the Howling Commandos are particularly suicidal, afraid of Peggy’s icy glare and red-hot temperament, saying nothing. Finally, without a word, someone hands Steve a key, shoving it into his palm, and he stares at the thing as if its a live grenade. They disburse to their rooms without comment.  
  
When they enter the room, it’s even more despondent than the outside. Its larger than a breadbox, barely. The makeshift bed is maybe big enough for Steve, but both of them would struggle, especially since the idea of touching Steve has been on her avoidance list running on close to a year.  
  
None of that matters. Steve immediately sets his sleeping mat on the floor beside the bed, making clear he isn’t intending on taking advantage of the situation. She shouldn’t have expected otherwise, of course. Steve, to a fault, would never put her in a compromising position. The stress in her shoulders drop.  
  
Later that night, Steve pads over to the fireplace and feeds the fire, stoking the embers with a thin long poll to get the blaze going again. He’s wearing fatigues, still mostly dressed despite the fact that she knows Steve likes to sleep shirtless most nights. The fire has warmed the room enough that Steve's enhanced abilities will leave him impervious to the chill in the air. A part of her hates that she wouldn’t mind seeing him shirtless. A part of her _really_ hates that she wouldn’t mind seeing the mark either, the one placed indecently high on his thigh.  
  
The room suddenly feels rather warm for such a cold night.  
  
“So,” Steve says, “I feel like I should address an elephant in the room.”  
  
Peggy closes her eyes, knowing she only has herself to blame for placing them in this scenario. “Yes, Captain?”  
  
Steve gives her a flat look. “ _Captain?_ Really? Peg, c’mon, it’s just you and me here.”  
  
She sighs. “You were talking about an elephant?”  
  
“I feel like you just addressed it right there with the _Captain_ thing.”  
  
She sits up in bed, flustered and irritated. “Steve, what is you’d like to say to me?”  
  
He pauses, at once bashful and annoyed. Quite the matching set they make. “Can we just—is there a way I can ask you a personal question without losing life or limb?”  
  
“I gather that would depend on the question.”  
  
Steve licks his lips, and she hates, _hates_ , hates that she notices it so well, despite the dim lighting. “Alright,” he says, like he’s bracing himself for something. He takes a breath, spitting out, “Do you have a mark?”  
  
“A mark?”  
  
“Yes,” he says, dangerously close to frustrated. “A mark, and you know what type of mark I’m talking about.”  
  
She does, of course, but a part of her wants to feign ignorance if only it could buy her enough time to figure out how to answer the question. She could lie, lay to rest any lingering possibilities of them, but that seems underhanded and cowardly, two things Peggy has never wanted to use to describe herself.  
  
She could also tell the truth, but that makes things far more complicated than they needed to be.  
  
In the end, because she truly is a proponent of _honesty being the best policy_ , her work as a spy notwithstanding, Peggy says, “Yes.”  
  
“Yes?” Now it’s Steve repeating answers.  
  
“Yes,” she clarifies. “I have a soulmark.”  
  
Steve nods slowly, like he was unsure of how to continue with the conversation, like he hadn’t anticipated reaching this point. “Okay, so, uh, would it be okay, would you be opposed to, uh—”  
  
“You still have no idea how to talk to women,” she mutters, looking up at the ceiling.  
  
It is impossible not to wonder why fate decided she’d best be served by a man that is as intelligent as he is physically powerful, that is as sinfully handsome as he is oblivious to that fact, all with the emotional maturity of a thick brick. It’s probably for the best. If he ever figures out how to talk to women, she could admit to herself that she’d be presented with a whole new problem to deal with, and one that would likely end in violence.  
  
“Can I see the mark?” he asks, finally.  
  
Peggy drops her gaze, finding his, and promptly forgets how to breathe.  
  
He deserves to know; she knows that much. He deserves to know because this affects him as much as it affects her, and if she’s being honest with herself, she knows she hasn’t been fooling anybody. Bucky suspects. She wonders if others do, too. But Steve is far too perceptive, even if a tad naïve, to ignore the tension left hanging between them. He’s noticed how she flinches away from his touch.  
  
She drops her hand to her neckline, pulling down gently to reveal the mark below her collarbone. Steve’s eyesight is better than 20/20, better than an eagle, even, but still he has to step closer to confirm what he’s seeing. The recognition in his face confirms that the same familiar mark adorns his body, as if she hadn’t already known.  
  
He doesn’t say anything. Just breathes in and out, steadily, clearly trying to come up with a response.  
  
Peggy breaks the silence. “I believe the colloquial goes, _I showed you mine, now you show me yours._ ”  
  
Steve swallows, and she watches the elegant contour of his throat, dip and bob, the light hitting at just the right angle. Strong muscles and graceful lines. She could, very much, imagine licking a tongue down those lines.  
  
Steve uncinches his belt, and Peggy’s throat goes dry. It isn’t fair what the serum did to him, a body unlike any other she’d ever seen. It isn’t fair that the anticipation she feels as he strips his trousers makes her feel like her skin is on fire, burning with a heat that she feels almost ashamed to admit. Except she doesn’t. Feel shame, that is. Confidence is not a trait that Peggy has ever been accused of lacking, in anything; her male colleagues would attest to that. But this is a different type, more brazen, more assured. Lust-ridden, crisp and sharp.  
  
Steve takes off his trousers, and there, just below the only piece of cloth covering his modesty, is the mark of the compass. Their compass. An exact match to the one he carries in his pocket with her picture inside. It’s almost enough to overshadow the erection she can clearly see rising through cloth. Steve does a rather pitiful job of covering it up with his hand, embarrassment and heat tinging his face.  
  
Slowly, Peggy rises up.  
  
It isn't her most calculated move. She hadn't started out the evening with any plans other than maintaining the course, ignoring the blooming charge between as she's always done. But Steve pushes against her defense constantly, a relentless barrage of pleasure and ache; it isn't hard to fall for the assualt, to let go of the protests and acknowledge what's only been apparent between them since day one. In fact, its the easiest thing in the world.  
  
Steve is passive, neither taking a step forward or backwards. Despite the telltale desire in his eyes, the heavy breathing that she can distinctly hear, the way he is quite evidently well-endowed and eager, he is choosing to let Peggy author how the night will go. She knows, instinctively, that he will do _anything_ she asks, absolutely anything, a type of power she shouldn’t find as exhilarating as she does.  
  
She comes within a hand’s reach, stopping as she’s always stopped, just at the threshold of touching him. They both know what will happen if she touches him. They both have heard the stories about the power in that first touch, a quiet thirst that can’t be quenched until there’s _completion._ His body is better than she imagined, which is saying a considerable deal given how often her mind has tripped over this image. His arms have filled out just as nicely as the rest of him. She could already tell the past year of training and frontline fighting has been flattering to his form. He’s gained some muscle since the last time she saw him in any state of undress, broader in the shoulders and chest. As if it was possible to improve upon perfection.  
  
Slowly, Peggy reaches out to touch him, her palm gently cupping the rough stubble of an unshaven jaw, and that first touch goes electric. Goes sheer poker red hot, down her spine, through her body, like lightning and fire, and not so a little bit like sex. It’s the demand of the emotions that throws Peggy, a swift need rising in her, betraying emotions half of which she can’t even name. She feels caught in a maelstrom, and she's not the only one.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” Steve whispers, heavily, closing his eyes.  
  
Then Steve breaks, lips crashing into hers, hot, slick, and demanding. She hadn’t given him permission, but it doesn’t matter because she can’t think, drunk in the onslaught of sensations. The moment is charged with excitement, a sort of reckless clash of his desperation and hers. She runs her hands all over him, luxuriating in the flex of his well-toned muscles, reveling in the feel of finally being able to touch him. His hands on her are almost possessive, obsessive – _greedy_ in their exploration. She feels distinctly overdressed.  
  
She always knew it would come to this. One way or another, since the moment she realized he had her mark, it was only a matter of time they’d end up like this. Maybe that was why she’d resisted it so hard, because the inevitability meant she had no control, and Peggy has always prided herself on control. Now, it’s almost ridiculous how little that matters, especially in comparison to everything else. Her body feels raw with emotion, with need, and—  
  
There’s banging on their door, the urgent kind.  
  
“Go away!” Steve barks angrily, immediately back to kissing her.  
  
“Boss,” Dum Dum shouts back, sounding apologetic and insistent at the same time, “We’ve got company! HYRDA elite!”  
  
Peggy wants to swear inventively enough to scandalize a sailor.   
  
“Well,” she breathes heavily, instead. “Raincheck?”  
  
Steve doesn’t say anything, hopping to put on his trousers. He gives her a look, though, flat and even, promising so much more than he can say with words.  
  
“Raincheck,” he agrees, and pulls her to him for a hard kiss, quick and fast like a punch.  
  
He’s out the door before she follows.  
  


#

  
It isn’t so much that Steve takes pleasure in violence, but Peggy can tell by the way he slams a man back twenty yards that he’s certainly taking out some frustrations.  
  
She watches as he drops from the ledge, still shirtless (at least he had trousers on, thank God), and vaults into a somersault that catches a HYDRA man in the throat. He crashes to the floor, but Steve keeps going, hurdling passed fallen enemies and then bounding down the hallway to his left. There’s a pair of guards standing there, stunned with surprise and not very good at their jobs, and he uses that moment to leap into them, hurling them through a closed door into a snow-banked encampment outside.  
  
“So,” Barnes says, lightly, to Peggy. “Eventful night?”  
  


#

  
After that, there isn’t room for much of anything else except their mission.  
  
The slopes of the Tatras mountains are treacherous things, and they now know that the element of surprise is lost. It’s a race to Agoston, the doctor with a PhD in theoretical physics whose expertise Schmidt desires for reasons passing comprehension. The bitter cold isn’t anything like she’d ever experienced before and she realizes the rumors she’d heard last year about so many bodies being unveiled in the spring thaw – well, they aren’t just rumors after all.  
  
They set a grueling pace, and Peggy doesn’t complain only because her pride won’t allow it. The other men in the company don’t have any qualms, complaining loudly and repeatedly every chance they get, which isn’t often with the wind howling and biting at her ears.  
  
Steve keeps within eyesight of her the entire time. It’s ridiculous that she can feel anything other than cold and miserable, but her nerves feel alit, on fire, and now that she’s touched him, she feels bereft without it, cheated out of something that should be _hers_.  
  
Steve feels the same; she knows it, knows it in her bones and her rushing blood, in every coveted glance they exchange. He brushes up beside her on the way up the slope, and she hears his quiet intake of breath and the strangled loose profanity. She wonders if he can think about anything other than finishing what they started in that room. She can’t.  
  
Duty first, of course.  
  
They finally make the peak, and the descent is easier only by the laws of relativity. Skiing isn’t a pastime she will ever imagine enjoying, not after this. The slope down is wrought with trees, and more than once, her inexperience is nearly fatal. Once, she avoids slamming into a tree only because Steve is there to pull her off her course, taking her down by the waist so they end up in a pile of snow.  
  
“Thanks,” she breathes, heavily, eyes locking onto his. He’s on top of her. “Funny, I always pictured it the other way around,” she says lightly.  
  
He coughs. “We should, ah, we should get moving.”  
  
His eyes drift down to her lips, and she thinks, if she doesn’t stop this, it will end in a rather compromising situation for all involved.  
  
“Steve?” she tries, rather faintly.  
  
He clears his throat, nods, and rises. He helps her off the ground, and holds her hand for far longer than necessary, and Peggy luxuriates in the heat and the warmth of the feeling, two separate sources and different types of intensity.  
  
But then a gunshot rings out, echoing through the mountain.  
  
At first, Peggy doesn’t understand, doesn’t comprehend it, but her body registers the hit before she does. So does Steve. He catches her as her knees buckle like an accordion, arms falling limp like ropes, and she crumples to the ground with a reverberating finality, the virgin white snow bleeding red.  
  


#

  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
She hears the monitor beeping, but that isn’t what brings her awake. The feel of a hand brushing lightly over hers is the first thing to register. Peggy’s eyes feel crusty when she comes to, Steve a rumpled mess in some hospital chair beside her, head down, absently stroking her hand without conscious effort.  
  
He bolts up from the chair. “Peg, God, you’re awake.”  
  
“You look,” she rasps out, “like you've seen a ghost.”  
  
Her throat is parched, and before she can get anything else out, Steve alerts someone and a line of medical staff come assailing her with promises of needles and examinations. Steve takes a step back, and she feels the moment he lets go of her hand like a tether being cut. A white partition is drawn closed for her privacy, leaving Steve on the other side. She hears someone ask him to step out of the room while they check her out.  
  
The doctors are polite enough, checking vitals, ordering medication, reviewing charts, but they aren’t telling her much. She gathers that she’s back in London, hospitalized for over a week, that she took two bullets to the back and is damn lucky to be alive. Her feet are wrapped in thick enough bandages that she fears frostbite may have claimed at least one piece of her body, but the drugs make her too blurry-eyed and unfocused to voice the fear. She hears whispers about tests. There are guards at the door, the type meant ostensibly for her protection, but she can’t help but wonder why they’re there.  
  
It isn’t until they’ve taken the third sample of her blood that she realizes it.  
  
When Steve returns, he looks haggard and rough around the edges, but tries for a smile.  
  
Her eyes lift to his, matter-of-factly asking, “They know I’m your soulmate, don’t they?”  
  
Steve flinches, apologetically. “I had to donate blood. A lot of it.”  
  
Of course. Soulmates are always a match, but she suspects there may be more interesting complications given Project Rebirth.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, “I know you probably didn’t want anybody to know.”  
  
“What makes you so certain of that?”  
  
“I don’t know, maybe the fact that you didn’t tell _me_ for over a year?”  
  
It’s her turn to look away. He’s standing at a distance, a self-imposed punishment. As much as she wants to be angry, it’s more a torrent of things. Yes, she’s irritated that her personal life is out there for everyone to know, before she’s even figured out herself what she plans to do with Steve, but she can’t blame him for that. She’s appreciative of his assistance, and probably has her life to thank for it, but she’s also curious about the side-effects; actually, _concerned_ would be a better word.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” she says, and grants him absolution when she reaches out her hand.  
  
He’s at her bedside in an instant, taking her hand in his, warmth seeping into her fingers. “How do you feel?”  
  
“A bit better than you look,” she tells him. “When was the last time you slept?”  
  
“I’ll sleep when you sleep,” he says.  
  
But that’s a lie, because she’s fairly sure he doesn’t get an ounce of sleep while she spends the next few days slumbering away.  


# 

He barely leaves her side in the hospital, except for when Peggy is getting her dressings changed or using the facilities, and only goes home when the nurses kick him out because he’s starting to smell like ripe cheese. He leaves only after he gives her a probing look, waiting for the go-ahead, and she wrinkles her nose in agreement and shoos him off. He goes reluctantly, even against his better judgement, and even if she’s gotten used to ordering men around (even Steve to a certain extent, rankings be damned), there’s a different flavor of obedience in his demeanor now.  
  
He comes back each day looking more and more like himself. They still don’t have any privacy, though, a round of hospital staff barging in or guards standing sentry nearby. They only get a few moments to themselves, and Steve is the first to broach, as he’d earlier named it, the elephant in the room.  
  
“Peg,” he says. “I know this probably isn’t the best time or place. I just don’t want to waste any more time. So, I figure I’ll say this while you have little chance of running away.”  
  
They did have the world’s worst sense of timing, but Peggy feels anxiety coil up her spine. “Steve,” she says softly, hesitant.  
  
But he’s already continuing over her. “I should have said this a long time, but I don’t think you’ve ever been left clueless about how I feel about you. You’ve been my true north since the day I met you.”  
  
Surprisingly, he doesn't stumble over the words. She feels like he must have rehearsed these words many times over the last few days (maybe even the last few months). Rather than calling him out on it, she is struck by the surprising realization that she feels the same. It doesn’t make any of this easier. “We’ve been through a lot, and I admit, what happened in Poland was more my instigation than yours—” to this, he raises an eyebrow at her, as if to say _understatement of the century_ , but she barrels through, “but we are not in the line of business that allows for emotional compromise. Look at what happened.”  
  
“You didn’t get shot at because we kissed, Peg,” Steve objects.  
  
Maybe. But maybe if she’d hadn’t been so bloody distracted by his intolerably handsome face and overwhelming presence, she could have seen the threat coming. He managed – and still manages – to block out all her other senses simply by being in the same room. She finds her eyes drawn to his hands, strong and masculine, yet capable of the most delicate and beautiful drawings, and it isn’t hard to imagine what else those hands would be more than capable of doing.  
  
That type of nonsense can’t be suitable for the field, for either soldier or spy. A part of her can’t help but wonder if, maybe, she should stick to her guns and wait until this is all over, when the war is done and gone, and Steve can take her for that dance.  
  
But then he leans closer, and all senses wreak havoc with her. It was difficult before they’d touched, ignoring the way he made her pulse speed up. Now, she feels rather lost to it, dazed. She could stop him, she could stop all of this from happening, but the fundamental truth is she doesn’t want to, and she’s tired of pretending otherwise.  
  
When he leans forward to brush a kiss across her lips, she steels out a hand to rest against his jaw, feeling nerves alit and alive. It’s a soft kiss, not quite like their first which had subsisted on frenzied, frantic passion. He feels like he’s promising something to her in that kiss, and she wishes she wasn’t in a hospital bed, recovering from a thousand cuts and scrapes, nurses nearby enough to hear their murmurs; she wishes he didn’t taste like desperation, like a week-long stubble that spoke of misery, that he hadn’t been through torment these past few days.  
  
She wishes for so many things.  


# 

  
But it’s two steps forward, four steps back.  
  
Her rebab doesn’t go smoothly, although the doctors tell her its nothing short of miraculous. There’s some muted effects of regeneration and healing, either by soulmate bond or blood transfusion, there’s a heated debate about that, but Peggy comes out of a life-threatening ordeal with hospital discharge orders after only two weeks.  
  
She wants to get back to work immediately, but Phillips isn’t having it. Besides, when she’d been bleeding out some two thousand meters up on a snow-banked mountain, the Howling Commandos had already broken off to seize the scientist they’d been after. Dr. Agoston barely avoided becoming another brilliant scientist in Red Skull’s hands, and he’s apparently grateful enough to have already started work for the SSR. Phillips sharply reminds her that they won’t lose the war effort if she’s out of commission for a few more weeks.  
  
Steve is only too happy for her sabbatical, but he isn’t afforded the same privilege. He’s told to go back to the field, which he declines rather stubbornly, going against direct orders from several higher-ups. Phillips nearly blows a gasket.  
  
“Let them court martial me,” Steve says, dismissively, opening the car door for her when she’s finally discharged. “Somebody else can smile for the propaganda reels.”  
  
“Steve,” she warns, wincing a bit as she climbs into the old coupe. Steve is being annoyingly gallant, waiting for her to settle before he closes the passenger-side door. She hadn’t lost any toes or limbs but recovering from severe frostbite isn’t pleasant, and her mobility isn’t yet up to snuff. “You have to go,” she tells him, when he gets behind the driver’s seat. “Duty first.”  
  
“I’m not having this conversation with you, Peg. You nearly _died_.”  
  
“Yes, thank you, I was there.”  
  
“But you didn’t see what I saw.”  
  
Peggy seals her lips closed, knowing this tactic is a losing one. “What about the Howling Commandoes?”  
  
“They’re going out,” Steve answers. “Bucky will keep ‘em in line.”  
  
She continues to argue, but Steve is more stubborn than an ox when he sets his mind to something and the conversation goes nowhere fast. Eventually they drive in stewing silence, Peggy frustrated with the idea that the Allies’ best hope at winning the war is too busy playing nursemaid to her. Peggy feels wound up, wired. Tired. Her entire body _aches._ Steve, by contrast, looks like he’s just woke up from a fresh nap, rested and ready to go, no visible signs of any moral or principled misgivings in his duties as a military man.  
  
The scenery turns sobering as they pass through the more heavily attacked London districts. It’s been a year already since the last bomb, but the devastation leaves London so torn apart it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever recover from it. Broken buildings bent at the waist, crumbling infrastructure, half-cobbled streets. The sky is murky with clouds, a slow evening drizzle gradually dousing the construction men picking through the rubble.  
  
They drive a little further, but when they reach their destination, she’s surprised to find a one-room flat rented out in an old boarding house meant for married Officers.  
  
“It’s only temporary,” he says.  
  
Of course. The status of a soulbond is the same as a marriage certificate in the eyes of the US Government. She is probably already listed as his next of kin and will hold the status of a widow beneficiary to all his posthumous benefits. She isn’t entirely sure the benefits are reciprocal, but the logistics slam into her like a kick to the stomach. The oddity of finding herself living with Steve because of basic military protocol is absurd.  
  
Then she realizes he’d had to have known about these arrangements for a while. He probably filled out paperwork.  
  
And she turns to him, well _beyond_ angry now. “Steve, you had no right.”  
  
To his credit, he doesn’t bother denying it. “I know. I’m just trying to make sure you don’t go climbing out a window the first chance you get, trying to get back to work.”  
  
A few weeks, and he’s already acting _possessive_ , like he has any right to opinions on what she says or does. It’s her fault for giving him the encouragement. They’d kissed, yes, and almost did a fair bit more than that, but she isn’t Mrs. Rogers and she hasn’t agreed to any of this. She’s avoided marriage all this time because she knows as soon as she did it, society would treat her as an extension of her husband, his property with a pretty smile.  
  
And now here she is, marked as _taken,_ as good as married _,_ when she’d never signed up for anything of the sort.  
  
Trying to gather her words, to find a landing to catch purchase on, because she’s usually articulate even when she’s bent out of shape, Peggy opens her mouth; words fail her.  
  
“I’m taking the couch,” he offers sheepishly, into the void.  
  
“You’re bloody right, you are,” she seethes. “You have no idea what you’ve just done. You have no idea how hard it is for a woman in the military, especially one with any rank. In one unilateral move, you’ve reduced me to your appendage, an asterisk by your name.”  
  
“Peg,” Steve protests. “It isn’t like that—”  
  
“It certainly _is._ ”  
  
She needs a moment, before she says or does something she’ll regret. She hadn’t even been this angry when he’d kissed some other woman, because this isn’t about petty jealousy or bad timings, it’s about how the world will see her now. Captain America’s girlfriend, wife, soulmate. They were all the same things, labels for chattel when she’d fought tooth and nail to be her own person.  
  
Marching into the adjoining bedroom, she slams the door shut behind her, turning around to be confronted by the large singular bed sitting in the corner.  


# 

It’s a cold front, after that.  
  
Even if they hadn’t had her recovery to deal with, her anger douses any possibility Peggy entertained about finishing things off on activities they’d only half-started in Poland. Steve barely says anything those first few days, moving about like a shadow, waiting for her to explode. Peggy isn’t going to give him the satisfaction of that. She maintains her dignity, focusing on her rehab exercises to expedite recovery as quick as possible.  
  
She ignores Steve; she ignores the envelope with her new dog tags listing her soulmark in it; she ignores the looks of the married couples on the floor, one of which invites Peggy and Steve over for dinner. Except, of course, she’s not known as Peggy and he’s not known as Steve, because Captain America is too popular even in Europe. They take the names Betty and Grant Carver, aliases assigned by the SSR – and she is going to _maim_ Phillips when she gets her hands on him, court martial be damned. The aliases reek of his fingerprints and particular brand of humor.  
  
Howard visits them towards the end of the week, having flown in from France. She’d be flattered, if she didn’t already know his concern for her is partially dwarfed by his scientific curiosity.  
  
“The regenerative abilities,” Howard starts telling her, “in your bloodwork is already leaps and bounds ahead of anything my team has been able to replicate. We’ve been working with samples of Steve’s blood for a year now, and _nada_. You come along and siphon his abilities just after a few transfusions.”  
  
“I don’t feel particularly recovered even now, Howard.”  
  
“You don’t know, do you?” Howard bites out. “I’ve read your charts. You should be _dead_ , Peg. Not griping about stiffness and sour muscles. _Dead_.”  
  
Peggy sits back, saying nothing. Steve has only sporadically mentioned the events of the mountain after she’d been shot, but the waves of something suspiciously like _grief_ comes off of him like bad cologne every time he does. She knows it wasn’t pretty, and it simply _couldn’t_ have been, with what happened and where they were, but for the first time since this whole strife with Steve began, a sliver of empathy for him worms it’s way in. Just a sliver.  
  
“Look,” Howard says, “the hits you took would’ve killed anyone off, save for only one other individual in the world and he happens to share your bathroom. Where is Steve, anyway? I thought he’d be here.”  
  
“Out for a run,” she says, clipped, because Steve has been astute enough to realize more and more that she needs space.  
  
Howard lifts an eyebrow at her tone. “Trouble in paradise already?”  
  
She doesn’t dignify that with a response. “So, do you imagine the transfusion was only part of the reason I’m alive? I was capable of inheriting Steve’s regenerative abilities for… _other_ reasons.”  
  
Howard clears his throat. “Your… _other_ reasons,” he chooses her wording rather reluctantly, “intersects with a field of medicine and mumbo-jumbo I can’t quite wrap my head around. But,” he waives a finger, “I have been doing research.”  
  
He pulls out an old tome, something written in an ancient language.  
  
“Is that Old Aramaic?” she asks.  
  
“Unfortunately,” Howard grouses. “Translating has been, excuse my language, a fucking nightmare.”  
  
Sadly, her gifts with linguistics do not extend to dead languages. “What have you learned so far?”  
  
“If you want to sign up to be shackled to one person for the rest of your life, I guess Soulbonding is the way to go.” Howard shrugs, looking as if he’s repressing a shudder simply at the idea of being tied down like that. “You get a lot of benefits. Shared immunity, shared blood-type, shared healing abilities, although clearly in our case, you’re not getting the full _oomph_ of Steve’s healing powers. There’s a lot about the initial,” Howard grins here, “ _touch_ a couple goes through, how that solidifies the bond in a dozen different ways.”  
  
Howard is being both delicate and shameless, and neither is appreciated when talking about her love life. Besides, while things had certainly steamed up in Poland, and she’d definitely touched Steve, the old wives’ tales always talked about sex as the first seismic act of touch between soulbonds.  
  
“Steve and I haven’t had sex,” she declares, matter-of-factly.  
  
Howard’s mouth drops open enough to catch flies. She isn’t one to air dirty linen about, but Howard may help her make a clearer picture of everything going on.  
  
“Why,” he manages, eventually, “the hell not?”  
  
“Howard,” she sighs.  
  
“No, no, I mean, have you seen him? He’s _literally_ a perfect specimen, and you two always seemed so enraptured with one another – and you, Peg, you’re —  
  
“Be careful how you phrase your next words,” she warns, anticipating any number of problematic compliments.  
  
Howard clamps his mouth shut, some sense of self-preservation rearing its head, but she can tell he’s still having trouble wrapping his head around it. He casts a look around the place, like he’s trying to figure out the deal of them staying in the same flat without jumping each other ten rounds a day. Peggy can admit, even livid with Steve, it takes all her substantial discipline.  
  
“Okay,” Howard says, slowly. “Well, from what I’ve gathered, you and he haven’t really… hit your maximum compatibility yet. What I mean to say is—”  
  
“Yes, thank you. I can read between the lines.”  
  
Howard braves a smile, shaking his head. “I swear, I can never figure a woman out.”  
  
“That’s because your blood is always rushing in the wrong direction when you’re in the presence of one.”  
  
Howard outright grins. “You know me so well, Peg.”  
  
After that, she doesn’t gleam too much out of the conversation, although she goes on to ask Howard to forward her a copy of the book’s translation when he gets it. He also mentions that Dr. Agoston has been tinkering away at some theoretical physics applications that could be poppycock or revolutionize the world as they know it. “He keeps talking about a source so powerful,” Howard tells her, “it could create gateways to other galaxies. Sounded all a little too magical to me. I don’t know what could create that type of energy.”  
  
“Still,” Peggy replies. “If Schmidt is interested in him, then you should listen.”  
  
“I am.”  
  
They finish up tea, and he grabs his coat, headed for the door, when Steve walks back in.  
  
“Howard,” Steve says in surprise.  
  
“Steve,” Howard returns, heavily, laying his hands on the other man’s shoulders in a gesture of solidarity. “My condolences.”  
  
Steve looks immensely confused. “For what?”  
  
“For having what I’m sure is the biggest set of blue balls this side of the Atlantic.”  
  
Peggy rolls her eyes heavily and walks away.  


# 

  
She eavesdrops on Steve’s phone call that night, the one where Bucky tells him an op’s gone bad and they’ll be back in London within a few hours. Peggy rests gently against the cracked-open door, feeling her pit drop a little when Bucky tells him that Jones suffered injuries, likely permanent. Bucky took a hit too, to the left shoulder, breaking his arm in two places. She can’t make out everything on the call, but she can make out more than enough. Besides, one of the benefits of close quarters and her emerging soulbond is that she can read Steve’s wrought energy permeating the entire flat like the smell of a dead body. He’s packed with worry, but he’s still refusing to leave her side.  
  
She’s about to step in, when she hears Bucky say, _“Steve, we got intel saying a HYDRA agent in London knows about Carter. About – you know – you two.”_  
  
Steve stiffens. “What’d you hear?”  
  
_“Jones wasn’t able to tell me that much before he blacked out. He mentioned something about a chimera, or something, and that they had been talking about her. But it wasn’t making much sense. That was about it.”_  
  
Peggy pulls back, lips pressed thinly. Chimera. She’d heard that word before, three months back, buried in one of the reports that made it across Phillips’ desk. It was a codename for a HYDRA agent, a man with jetblack hair and a sharp streak of white at the top. Rumors had it that he’d infiltrated some factory in the borough of Tower Hamlets, where they produced Allied weaponry for the war. She remembered the report thoroughly.  
  
She also remembered Phillips had dismissed her request to investigate the lead when she’d asked. They’d had more pressing concerns at the time, and he’d assigned Bromley to the task of uncovering more about Chimera. Bromley was an idiot, though. He’d dismissed the rumors after only a day of investigation.  
  
A plan is formulated almost without pause. Peggy steps away as Steve is wrapping up his call, but she’s already reaching for her coat and scarf, grabbing the keys to the coupe before he can make it out of the room to stop her.  


# 

  
In front of her, there is a sizable assembly line of some sort and a few wooden crates lay stacked to one end, but otherwise the area is completely vacant. There’s one security camera in the hall running a sweeping arc every thirty seconds. Peggy counts the seconds, while noting a broom in the distance. The timing has to be perfect. When she enters in, the camera is facing the opposing end and on its sweep back. She runs towards the broom, snags it, and keeping her eyes on the camera, she works the broom handle to tilt the camera angle up and away.  
  
Breaking into the back office is so simple, it’s almost boring. She rummages through personnel files, looking at pictures of all the factory workers until she stumbles upon one that fits the description of the Chimera’s unique hairstyle, black hair with a tuft of white at the top. She snags the file, goes out the side door, and sees a security guard coming around the corner.  
  
She slips down the hallway, out the side door, and is almost free and clear of the entire factory when she spots another guard at the gates. Before Peggy can deviate course, a hand shoots out from nowhere and pulls her into the shadows of a back alley.  
  
“What,” Steve demands, “do you think you’re doing?”  
  
“My job, darling,” Peggy returns. “Quite successfully, too, so you needn’t have tagged along.”  
  
“You’re supposed to be resting.”  
  
“This is hardly a dangerous mission. I haven’t even risked breaking a nail.”  
  
He sighs, resisting the effort to continue the argument. He’s wearing civilian clothes, at least, because the last thing they need is his uniform drawing unwanted attention. A 3-button single-breasted suit in a dark blue color, matching tie, with a wool coat and felt fedora. Even in civilian clothes, he attracts his fair share of attention.  
  
“What did you get?” he asks her.  
  
“The address of your HYDRA spy, Chimera,” Peggy says, holding up the folder.  
  
“How did you know about that? Were you spying on me?”  
  
“How did you know where I was? Tracking me?”  
  
“Tracker on the car,” Steve clarifies.  
  
Peggy would be annoyed, but frankly she’s a little impressed.  
  
The guard does a sweep of the area, pushing Steve and Peggy further down the back alley. She can see Steve calculating a way of out of this. “So,” she whispers, archly. “What grand plan do you have to escape this perilous endeavor?”  
  
She can see a wry smile playing on his lips, like he knows she’s goading him and he won’t take the bait. “These guards aren’t soldiers. They’re just men doing their jobs, protecting a building that houses weaponry and supplies for men on the front. I don’t plan on using any force on them.”  
  
“Well, I’m glad we can agree on that,” she whispers, hearing a guard nearby. “But do tell—”  
  
Steve spins her around and backs her against a wall. “Play along,” he whispers into her ear, and then his mouth is crashing into hers, scuttling any thought or protest. He opens her mouth with his own, heavy against her, a weight she hadn’t forgotten for a moment since their first dalliance. She finds her hand ringing his tie, sensory overload, and—  
  
“Dear lord,” someone says, coughing.  
  
She rips her mouth free, tossing a frantic gaze down the pathway at the guard. Her hand rests against Steve's broad chest, along the dark buttons lining his wrinkled shirt, and she's practically pinned against the wall between where he planted his hands; she knows exactly what picture they make.  
  
“This isn’t the place for this sort of thing,” the guard says, annoyed. “Move it!”  
  
Steve pulls away, breathing heavily. He offers apologies to the guard as they stumble together down the alley, affecting an infatuated couple too blitzed on hormones to walk a straight line. It isn’t, she knows, entirely an act. She places a hand on him for support, giggling drunkenly as she scurries away, still putting up a front, but she can feel the heat rising off him, the strong muscles under his shirt, rigid and tense.  
  
When they get far enough away, Peggy tries to put some distance between them. “So that was your brilliant plan?”  
  
Steve is still close enough that she can smell his aftershave. She feels trapped by his proximity, hyperaware, the memory of that one night brought to the forefront for no other reason than he is right next to her.  
  
“That was my brilliant plan,” he agrees, although he sounds like he wasn’t expecting to be so affected by his own idea.  
  
They make it to the car, and Peggy insists on driving simply because it’ll preoccupy her hands. Steve doesn’t argue, sliding into the passenger seat with barely a word.  
  
Peggy has eyes as much as the next girl, but she’s always prided herself on keeping an even keel, even in the presence of the great Captain America himself. But an unstable fog of lust blankets everything between them. In that moment, if she had her way, she’d put her attraction to him, intense and intoxicating, straight into a box to be dumped at the bottom of the ocean. Because it – _he_ – distracts her in a way that goes down to her soul, and she isn’t even using hyperbole. She struggles with control, with what this all means, because she’s losing a war that she’s not even sure she should be fighting.  
  
The drive back to the flat is silent. She can feel him watching, can feel the restrained energy practically vibrating off of him, and it should perhaps assure her, that’s she’s not in this mess by herself. He’s feeling everything she is, maybe even worse. Her skin prickles under his gaze.  
  
When they make it back to their place, Peggy circumvents the couch, unwrapping her scarf and unbuttoning her coat. She needs to keep busy. She needs to keep her hands occupied. She grabs dirty dishes from the table and sets them in the kitchen sink, then braces her hands against the countertop for a moment. Willing composure, regaining it, before she has the strength she needs to walk back out there and face him.  
  
When she returns to the main room, Colonel Phillips is standing there.  
  
“Carter,” Phillips greets. “You’re looking better than the last time I saw you. Finally got some color in your face.”  
  
“Colonel Phillips,” she returns, trying to control her fluctuating emotions. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”  
  
“We need to talk,” Phillip says, turning to Steve. “There are serious things happening out there in the world, and your assistance is needed. Enough is enough, we need you back in the field, Captain.”  
  
Steve begins to protest, but Peggy cuts in, “Colonel, do you mind if I speak privately with him for a moment?”  
  
“Go ahead,” Phillips says, “Knock some sense into him. God knows I’ve tried.”  
  
She motions for Steve, and he joins Peggy in the small kitchen. She boxes herself into a small corner and then realizes the mistake when Steve crowds around her, making the cramped space seem infinitely smaller.  
  
“I understand you’re concerned about me,” she begins, “but the Colonel is right, and your friends are getting hurt out there without your leadership. If I promise to rest, _truly rest_ , follow the doctor’s order to a “T,” will you go back out there?”  
  
“Are you even capable of doing that?”  
  
“If I make a promise, Captain, I keep it.”  
  
His licks his lips like he’s thinking about it. “Is there some other reason you suddenly want me away that I should read into?”  
  
Peggy pauses. “I truly believe this is for the best for everyone.”  
  
Steve reacts to the words like she subtly pushed him back. He retreats a step or two, nodding, eyes closing briefly like he’s resigning himself; her instinctive reaction is to reach out to him and disabuse him of the notion that this is a rejection. The needs of the many simply outweigh the needs of the few. But just as well, she knows he’ll respect her request this time because he’s interpreted it a different way. Steve would never encroach into romantic territory where he is not a hundred percent welcomed.  
  
When all things are said and done, Peggy is aware that she has complete control over how far they progress. He’s simply waiting on her go-ahead.  
  
“I’ve got one additional condition,” Steve says. “You take on a protection detail.”  
  
Peggy recoils. “I do not need—”  
  
“Yes, you do,” Steve insists. “You’re not up to your full strength, and HYDRA knows about you. Which means they might come after you. If I’m not here, I need to know you’ll be safe.”  
  
Every instinct in Peggy’s body rebels, affronted at the idea of being taking care of like a shrinking violet. She’d signed up for the war the same as anyone else.  
  
“I’d like Bucky to stay here for a while,” Steve tacks on.  
  
“Wait, hang on,” she protests. “He’s been injured, from what I gathered.”  
  
“And there’s still no one I’d trust more. There’ll likely be other guards, but you’d be—”  
  
She puts a hand up to stall him, needing a moment to figure this out. Frustration and offence mix with rationale and strategy. Even if she declined, given the Howling Commando’s intel from tonight, Phillips would assign her protection and wouldn’t give a damn what she thought. This way, at least, Steve would return to the field where he is intensely needed, without being distracted with worry at every turn.  
  
Besides, Barnes she can handle. He’s never been a man to follow rules as strictly as some of his counterparts. His attitude may work to her benefit, and the most egregious thing he’d even done was flirt shamelessly at her, at the beginning; as soon as Steve had expressed the slightest interest in her he’d backed off.  
  
“Fine,” she agrees, unhappily.  
  
Steve heads back to Phillips, standing at attention, body all hard lines and sharp cutting angles. “Sir, reporting for duty.”  
  
Colonel lets out a sigh of both relief and agitation. “Glad to see she’s having a positive influence on you.”  


# 

“Hey,” Barnes greets, dropping a dirty green rucksack at his feet. One arm is bandaged up and in a sling, and he has a cut above the eye. He doesn’t look as bad as he could, because in war that’s always a sliding scale to men’s appearances, but he does look like he’s been through the ringer. He takes a gander around their place, spotting the lone couch in the flat. “Guess that’s where I’m sleeping? Looks kinda small.”  
  
“Steve has made do,” Peggy says.  
  
Before Barnes can respond, Steve comes out from the bedroom carrying his own bag. He greets Barnes at the door, and Peggy leaves them to it, wandering into the small kitchen to pull some medicine from the cabinet. She feels a headache coming on.  
  
“Peg,” Steve appears in the doorway. “I’m headed out.”  
  
She has to brace herself for a moment before turning around to face him. There are twin creases settling deep between his eyebrows. He looks timid, defenses left threadbare; he has the look of a man struggling to figure out his next move. She mostly feels like they’re feeling all the worsts parts of the soulbond, and none of the best. She tries her best to stay calm and impassive, but she’s never quite mastered that particular bluff with Steve.  
  
“Take care,” she manages, rooted in her spot.  
  
Steve takes that as all he’s going to get, so he turns to leave disappointed; Peggy reacts before she thinks. She folds the distance between them in a flash, pressing a kiss to his lips. Short, quick, encouraging. She pulls back before it can deepen, before they start edging back into dangerous territory, and Steve stares at her.  
  
“You take care of yourself,” she tells him again, but this time with emotion. “You still owe me that dance, Captain.”  
  
He smiles, staring at her with longing in his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”  
  
When he leaves, she imagines she’ll lose sleep to all kinds of thoughts that night.  


# 

  
What she isn’t expecting is for Barnes to wake her up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder. She’s up and to her feet in a flash, at first assuming an attack, but when she emerges to the living room with her sidearm brandished, Barnes is in the throes of a nightmare, thrashing about like he’s fighting an imaginary villain.  
  
Peggy wakes him, with some effort. When he finally comes to, there’s a wild look in his eyes, like he doesn’t even recognize Peggy at first. Then, it lands. “Carter, Jesus, sorry,” he manages through his panicked breathing, crashing back into the cushions. “Sorry, sorry.”  
  
He’s soaked in sweat and shaking. Peggy stands there, at first unsure of what to do. She knew he had troubles more than some, Steve had hinted at it on occasion, but this is more than she’d expected.  
  
She sets her Walther on the table and turns on the nearby lamp. “Come now,” she says. “It looks like either of us won’t be getting any further sleep. Tea?”  
  
He’s so thrown by the offer that he doesn’t even answer, but Peggy goes about making a fresh pot. While she’s in the kitchen, she takes her time, letting Barnes gather himself in peace. She’s dealt with men traumatized by war more than most, a handful even serving under her. She’s seen men freeze in battle, seen them balled up in corners, screaming and heated; she’s seen them hurl obscenities and furniture around in rage. There is nothing in the world more destructive than war, especially to the human condition.  
  
Eventually, Barnes joins her, silent. She sets the tea in front of him, and goes about making breakfast, starting with hot buttered toast and some eggs. It’s still dead in the night, hours till early morning, but they’re up anyway.  
  
“Do you want to talk about it?” she ventures, when she feels like he’s calmed down some.  
  
“God, no,” Barnes says. “I’m embarrassed you had to witness that.”  
  
“Don’t be,” she says, flipping eggs on the pan. “Nothing to be ashamed about. You’re not the only soldier who goes through these things, and you unfortunately won’t be the last. Our injuries and scars are what remind us we are still human, despite all this lunacy.”  
  
“Well,” he says gruffly, shaking his head. “All except Steve. I have to remind the guys he’s as human as the rest of us.”  
  
She gives a short laugh. “Well, he tends to be the exception to a fair number of rules.”  
  
“Yeah, but injuries didn’t even matter when he was scrawny. He kept diving into fights regardless of any bruises. Ma always said he was like a bulldozer, just smaller, more unassuming. He hid it with books.”  
  
It isn’t the first time he’s mentioned his family’s close connection to Steve, and it’s got him talking without looking ashen white. Peggy decides to keep with the topic. “You have a big family, I take it?”  
  
He shrugs. “Parents, two sisters, a good Catholic lot.”  
  
“And Steve, it sounds like, is an honorary member?”  
  
“Since I dragged him into my house at eight years old. Ma had to clean up his bloody nose.”  
  
She doesn’t know if that was related to a bullying incident or one of Steve’s frequent malaises as a child. She doesn’t ask.  
  
“What about you?” Barnes says, because it’s only the polite thing to do. “How big is your family? I already know you don’t have any sisters. Asked Steve that once already.”  
  
She could imagine the shamelessness behind the inquiry and rolls her eyes. “No sisters,” she confirms, then sobers. “Just… one brother, Michael.”  
  
Barnes picks up on her tone. “What happened to him?”  
  
“Air raid,” she replies, tightly. “Three years ago.”  
  
“Sorry,” Barnes voices, softly.  
  
“Yes, well, do your sisters a favor,” Peggy replies, trying to push past the lump in her throat. “Write to them a little more often, when you get the chance. They’ll appreciate it.” The eggs done, she places the plate of food in front of Barnes and sets a glass of orange juice next to it. “And don’t get used to this,” she warns. “This is a one-time thing. I’m not your bloody cook, Barnes.”  
  
He snorts, a little life coming back into him. “Bucky,” he says. “My friends call me Bucky.”  
  
She nods, watching him only for a beat while he digs in before turning away. She’s known him for over a year now, but she can firmly say she’s never really had much of a relationship with him outside of missions and their primary mutual connection, Steve. That, in and of itself, isn’t surprising. Even among the Howling Commandos, Peggy has to keep professional and discrete. If they were to share living space, however, she imagines some walls need to come down.  
  
And, if she’s being honest with herself, that may have already started before the eggs were done.  


# 

  
It’s hard to establish a normal routine with a man in the house. Steve had done his best to make his presence as imperceptible as possible those few days they’d shared space, aware of her temper and all the thorny issues laying between them. With Bucky, it’s already more disruptive. He leaves smelly clothes on the floor, dirty dishes on the table, and he sleeps all hours of the day. It’s like living with her brother all over again.  
  
A few other men join her contingent of guards, stationed outside the building in pairs, but this entire business is more “babysitting” than anything else, and everyone knows it. She has three weeks left in her rehab; Barnes has at least double that. She’ll have the last bloody laugh there, at least.  
  
He’s keeping secrets from her, too. She knows he’s working on the Chimera lead; she was the one that handed him the information, after all. But, adhering to the promise she made to Steve, she has not followed up on the investigation herself. Bucky is under no obligation to keep the intelligence away from her, but he insists on working by himself while he’s stuck in town.  
  
He hedges around her for days, too, dancing around a topic, but Peggy can feel him sizing her up, quietly assessing her. She’d be exasperated if, frankly, she hadn’t been doing the same.  
  
“Spit it out, soldier,” she says, one day snapping, “whatever it is.”  
  
“Steve really did sleep on that couch, didn’t he?”  
  
The question throws Peggy for a loop, coming out of nowhere. “Come again?”  
  
“Steve, tall fella, yay high,” Bucky gestures with his hand. “Handsome lug born on the fourth of July.”  
  
“I’m familiar.”  
  
“Clearly, but what gives? You’re lifebonded. I know it, everyone knows it. Even our enemies know it. You’ve been making googly eyes at each other since the first day I saw you, and while Steve isn’t the type to kiss and tell, it doesn’t take a genius. So, what gives?”  
  
Peggy flushes. “My relationship with Steve is none of your concern.”  
  
“I swear to god, even trapped together in a room you can’t get it together. Does everything have to be so painfully above board with you two?”  
  
“How is this any of your concern?” Peggy replies, growing annoyed.  
  
“He may be bigger than me now,” Bucky replies, shrugging a little, “but I’ve been protecting him since I was a kid. Call it rooted instinct at this point.”  
  
She’d be more upset, but the proclamation was slightly endearing. “And you feel he needs protection from me?”  
  
“There’s nothing I’ve seen that has stopped Steve in his tracks more.”  
  
Peggy glances away, then slowly squares her shoulders. “You needn’t worry about me when it comes to Steve. I am hardly a threat, and I have no intentions of hurting him.”  
  
“Well, since you used the word and all, what _are_ your intentions for him?”  
  
“Oh, you’re being ridiculous,” Peggy retorts, blushing a bit. “He’s a grown man, and what I do with him on a couch or a bed or any other flat surface is none of your business.”  
  
“Maybe,” Bucky agrees, amused, “but you were the one that asked me what was on my mind.”  
  
“Well, that’s a mistake I will surely endeavor to avoid in the future.”  
  
Bucky smirks a little, stuffing his good hand in his pocket as he walks away.  


#


	3. Chapter 3

Weeks pass, and Peggy grows restless. She follows Steve’s progress as he traipses his way through Europe – avoiding air raids, dismantling HYDRA bases – knowing that following the Howling Commandos’ stories is essentially following the trajectory of the war. But there’s a sense of unease buried in her chest now, and she tries not to give it a name, as if naming it would give it more power. All these years, she’s managed to keep her head firmly on her shoulders while he’s marched into one reckless battle after another, always there to greet him when he makes it back. This time it’s different. This time it’s more.

The doctors promise to release her to full duties within a week, but she can’t wait that long. She forces Bucky to join her in a visit to Colonel Phillips with the hopes of finagling an assignment. She’s hedged around the flat long enough, dancing around her anxiety, a wary and tottering dance that isn’t fooling anyone.

Enough is enough.

“This is useless, y'know,” Bucky says, as they pass security. “He told you he wouldn't let you back until the docs cleared you.”

“Clearly you underestimate the virtue of persistence,” Peggy replies.

Bucky snorts. “I’m learning I underestimated you on a lot of things, Carter, but tenacity ain’t one of them.”

She knows it’s a compliment but buried underneath it is just a prickle of a tease, and she won’t take the bait. Bucky has a habit of riling her up. They managed to live within the same quarters by the skin of their teeth. She hates messiness. He lives like a sloth. She prefers English tea, and he loves his flask. She prefers routine, and he seems to enjoy the freedom of a schedule void of military timetables. It’s a miracle they haven’t killed each other. 

Whether in the official SSR building or in their bunker, Philip’s department is always at the lowest sub-basement. Peggy picks her way through, but around them, the bullpen is in chaos. Something’s happened. Something that has everyone riled up. 

When she finds Phillips running over dispatch notes, he barely even glances up at her. “No,” he tells her, before she can so much as open her mouth. “You cannot go back to work.”

Behind her, she can practically feel Bucky’s conceit suffocating the room. Never mind his own arm cast will likely keep him out of commission for weeks yet. 

“Sir,” Peggy says. “My rehabilitation is further along than the doctors could have hoped for. There’s hardly even a mark on my back.”

“That should concern you as much as please you, Agent,” Phillips says. “We still don’t know what you’ve inherited from your soulmark. We can’t put you back in the field until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Peggy feels indignation swell. “Need I point out the hypocrisy of you allowing Captain Rogers in the field, but not me?”

“As your Commanding Officer, I wouldn’t recommend it,” Phillips tosses back, acidic but no-nonsense. “I don’t care if you don’t like it. One of the advantages of holding top brass is that I don’t have to care about my subordinate’s _feelings.”_

He says the last word like it’s a dirty word, but it’s all a bloody sham. As much he may play the brute, Phillips has a soft spot for her. She’s always known it, and the truth is the affection is returned in kind. The paternal fondness has never translated into this sort of frivilous over-protection, though. Phillips knows this is a time of war, and he’s always been one of the few to treat Peggy as proficient and capable, regardless of gender. 

Peggy doesn’t put a name to her misgivings, though. Her eyes draw towards the chaos of the room, the unmitigated pandemonium that usually transpires when they’re been under another attack.

“What’s happened?” she asks Phillips.

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Phillips answers stiffly. “Both of you are still off books. Sergeant Barnes, do your job and keep her out of trouble. Dismissed.”

Before she can further protest, he walks out the door, leaving her in Bucky’s presence. “It’s all right, Peg,” Bucky says. Even underneath all the prickliness, there is a budding sense of comradery. “You’ll get back out on the field before you know it. Before me, even.”

Peggy’s concern has already moved on. “Somethings happened.”

Bucky doesn’t argue; he’s noticed the unusual activity too. He stops a guard rushing by with a bundle of papers, half the documents slipping loose in his haste. “Private,” he orders the guard to stop. “What’s going on?”

The boy, no older than eighteen or nineteen with spots of acne still fresh on his face, gives a half-shouldered shrug. “There was a power surge last night in the labs. Some fat-head scientist must have done something real bad.”

Bucky says, “What does that mean?”

“There was a big explosion!” the private hollers hurriedly, as he’s out the door.

“That, in and off itself, is not surprising,” Peggy laments to Bucky. “There are many experiments under the protection of the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Experimented on by any number of scientists, most of whom wouldn’t dream of approaching the ingenuity of men like Howard Stark even suffering from a concussion. Although I’ll be damned if I let him hear that. His insufferable ego doesn’t need the fanning.”

Bucky snorts in agreement. “Let’s get out of here.” 

“Let’s not be premature. Something has happened. We should look around.”

“I have orders to keep you out of trouble. Direct orders. You were there twenty seconds ago when I received them.”

She lifts her eyebrow at him. “Honestly, Sergeant, where is your sense of curiosity?”

“It tends to run in the opposite direction of explosions. Call me crazy like that.” 

But she ropes him into exploring, of course, and they make it to the level where the event took place. She says “event” because she is not sure what to call it, other than a complete disaster. A wall size hole greets her in the corner corridor, but it isn’t the type she expects. There are burn marks along the edges, like something a laser would make. The mess is cordoned off with yellow tape, but Bucky distracts the cute girl at the end of the hall and Peggy slips in, pilfering through the items still left standing in the room.

She finds a cylinder tube underneath some ruble, broken with shattered glass. “ _Substance X,”_ it says, and then in larger letters, _“EXTREMELY VOLATILE. DO NOT HANDLE.”_

#

They make it no more than a few minutes in her search before they’re escorted off the premises by Phillips’ lackeys, a pair who had been ordered specifically to retrieve and remove Peggy. Damn the man, but he runs a tight ship and knows her too well. Indignant and more than a little disgruntled, Peggy leaves the building with Bucky trailing behind her, who prevents her from breaking something bodily of the guard escorting her out with a hand roughly at her waist. 

Outside, the weather is dim and foggy, matching her miserable mood. Bucky calls for a taxi, and the hackney carriage pulls to a stop before them. Peggy fixes her woolen coat, casting one last look at the building behind them. There’s smoke lingering in the air, and the smell of something like sulfur. 

Reluctantly, she starts to get in the cab—

And the hulking mass of Bucky hits her in full force, the brute hit pushing her to the ground as bullets strike the car nearby, shattering the window. 

For a short moment, she lays flat on the ground, buried beneath Bucky’s frame. The wind’s been knocked out of her, but even still she knows Bucky has just saved her life. Around them, the crack of a gunshot dies, and Bucky orders her to _stay. the. hell. down._ as he pushes off of her. He aims to return fire, a Smith & Wesson clutched in his good hand.

“I can’t get a bead on him,” Bucky fumes. The assailant is nowhere to be seen, a quick scan of the nearby buildings coming up empty. “The shot came from far,” he tells her.

He’s the best sniper she knows, so Peggy trusts his instincts, looking farther, past the northeast building, a block away. Her vision clears, pinpointing impossibly to a rooftop of a brownstone building. She can see the marksmen, black hair, a tuff of white on top, disassembling his weapon in order to flee.

Peggy takes off without warning, and she can hear Bucky calling out. The cars blare around her, but Peggy hardly notices, picking the fastest route towards the brownstone, slicing across the incoming traffic and cutting through a side alleyway. She runs like something is right at her heels, faster than she’s ever moved before, and even in the midst of a flat-out sprint, adrenaline pumping, heart beating a mile a minute, there is a part of her that knows this is not normal. 

This is too much like Steve. 

But as fast as she is, it isn’t enough. The building is empty when she finds it, an abandoned edifice left half standing in a cobbled mess, another victim of the air raids. She finds shell casings on the rooftop, the smell of gunpowder lingering in the cold air.

A few minutes later, Bucky comes through the roof door, fuming. “What part of _stay the hell down_ did you not understand?”

“The part where I take orders from you,” Peggy returns, rising to her feet. “We’ve missed him. He left these as a gift.”

She hands him the casings, but already her mind is two steps ahead. Running through logistics, mapping the trajectory of bullets, standing where the marksmen stood. _Chimera._ She is sure of it. If Bucky hadn’t pushed her down, her brains would have been splattered across the pavement as sure as the sun would rise. 

“How did you know someone was going to take a shot?” she asks Bucky.

He goes quiet for a beat. “I don’t know, really. Sometimes I get an itch, a sixth sense maybe. Saved my ass more times than I can count.”

Bucky is a tricky man to pin down. For all his jokes and smiles, there’s something lurking beneath the surface far more complicated. Peggy has always been observant, classifying the sleeping, eating and startle-response habits of most of Steve’s teammates. It’s easier with Bucky now because she shares a thin wall. The nightly terrors he wakes from, the hosts of incision lines down his torso, and the way, despite his predilection for whiskey and rum, he easily has the best reflexes in the Commandos, save for Steve – and he’s saved Steve on more than one occasion, too. 

“Thank you,” she says, sincerely. 

Bucky looks uncomfortable. “Yeah, well. I’d never be able to look Steve in the eyes again if I’d let anything happen to his girl.” 

“Heaven forbid.”

It's only a second later that Peggy realizes the days where she would deny being Steve’s girl are apparently a thing of the past. 

“Hell,” Bucky tacks on, clearing his throat a little. “You keep things interesting, I'll give you that.”

That is as close of an admission to affection that Bucky Barnes is likely ever going to get with her. Peggy should take the moment to tease him, but they have more pressing concerns. 

“Was that you?” Bucky says, suddenly, pointing to the broken door on the rooftop. She must’ve shattered it when she’d slammed through. It looks like one of the messes Steve leaves behind. “You all right, Peg?” he asks her, but the question hides a whole host of other ones.

For once, Peggy isn’t able to properly answer.

#

Vision, strength, speed, healing. 

All have improved rather dramatically.

The next few days, there’s another barrage of testing. She’s subjected to every test known to mankind, and a few that are probably invented just for her. For the first time, she truly appreciates what Steve signed up for with Project Rebirth, because she thinks she’s been poked and prodded enough times that a comparison to swiss cheese would not be unwarranted. 

Howard gets roped in too, although he’s distracted in his examination. It takes him three tries to pull a proper blood sample from her, and he spins in his wheelie chair like a petulant child to yell at some poor nurse when she interrupts them. Generally Howard’s cad behavior would make it nearly impossible to yell at a pretty face, but Howard barely even registers the presence in his tirade. 

When he sends the poor woman off in tears, Peggy snaps at him, “Howard! Was that really necessary?”

His shoulders slump a little, but he’s still testy. “Sorry, Peg. I’ll apologize to her later. I’m just not in the best mood right now.”

“That’s no excuse,” she chides him. 

Something has him so bothered around the collar that he isn’t thinking straight. When it comes to Howard, there is only one thing that can do that – one of his experiments has gone horribly wrong. 

She takes a gamble. 

“What happened with Substance X?” she asks him.

Howard freezes, looking up at her with shock. “How do you know about that?” He pauses, ruefully shaking his head. “Never mind, of course you know about it. You’re Peggy Carter.”

“What happened, Howard?”

“Dr. Agoston, that’s what,” Howard spits out angrily. “The man is bonkers even by eccentric mad-scientist standards. I thought he had a bum rap, but nope. Peg, we _had_ it, the holy grail, we actually had it and the idiot played fire with it!”

“It?” 

“Substance X!” Howard exclaims, and Peggy has to nod along like she knows what that is. “Can you imagine? All the applications and possibilities, and the guy makes it explode within two days of us getting our hands on it! Two days!”

“Yes,” Peggy prods gently, “especially with its unique qualities of… what was it again?”

“Gravitational disruption, quantum vortex influxtions, raw regenerative power I’ve never seen!” Peggy’s face must give something away, because Howard pauses mid-rant, and stares at her. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“None whatsoever, but please do go on.”

His shoulders slump, and he’s so defeated that he doesn’t even censor himself. “We had it, Peg. Some fellas found it outside Jersey, a strange red substance. I say _substance_ because we honestly don’t know what it was. It moved like it was liquid, but Peg, it floated in mid-air. _Danced_ in the air. We hit it with every test known to mankind, and nothing made sense. This thing was singular in nature. I’m not even sure how nature created it!”

“That rare?”

“Agoston thought it supported his theories of other worlds and the fragile mailability of our reality. Said it was a substance so rare that it didn’t exist anywhere else in the universe.”

“And we found it in Jersey?” Peggy lets her incredulity slip in.

“Apparently it wasn’t always there,” Howard answers. “It moved on its own, jumped spots across the globe like it was playing hopscotch. I’m telling you, Peg, it had a mind of its own and it didn’t like obeying the laws of physics.”

Given they’re chasing a crazed, supernatural, red-skinned, self-aggrandizing war mongerer across the globe, Peggy’s sense of disbelief isn’t what it used to be. Still, the object sounded almost otherworldly from Howard’s colorful account.

“And Dr. Agoston destroyed it?” Peg clarifies.

Howard huffs. “Like a ten-year old kid with fireworks in his backyard. Oh, he claims someone stole it, a broad in some futuristic suit, but it’s baloney. We recovered the footage. The man didn’t even write anything down about the experiment! Writing things down is the difference between genuine science and goofing off. It’s a fine line sometimes, but it matters!”

“Yes, yes, Howard,” she pats his arm. “I know.”

“Peg,” he stresses again, “we _had_ it!”

#

Bucky shadows her the entire time she’s being poked and prodded, sticking to the corners of her room or perched just outside. She has an epiphany in that monotonous exam room while he waits. She has no hard proof, but she suspects Bucky withheld things about his captivity with Zola. It becomes apparent in the way he tenses whenever they take blood from her, or the way his eyes divert when she’s told to lay down for another examination. She could take Bucky at his word, that Zola did experiments on him just like he did on a hundred other prisoners of war, but she’s always been good at reading people. The time she’s spent with Bucky only reaffirms it.

“Did they ever tell you what they did to you?” she asks him, just once, when they’re alone and Bucky is flipping through the radio stations. “What Arnim Zola did?”

Bucky’s lips press into a thin line. “Nothing, really. Other than me nearly dying on the table twice a day.”

He's lying, of course. Peggy can tell.

Her gaze drops away and falls to his arm. He was supposed to be in a cast for another two weeks, at least, but he’d gone to the doctor and when he’d come back, the cast was gone. She wasn’t sure if the doctor had signed off on it or not, but Bucky doesn’t show any hindrance in his movement, no tug of pain. That type of recovery… well, she’s sure she isn’t the only one with unanswered questions about unexpected healing properties.

#

They take a four-hour flight and by hour two, Bucky has managed something that remotely resembles sleep, but Peggy can’t find it in her to manage the same. Col. Phillips has agreed, finally, that keeping her in London served little purpose now that HYDRA was aware of it. It hadn’t taken much to convince him into letting her join on the front line again, given she had passed every test with colors so spectacular Howard had opened a bottle of champagne. 

By some miraculous feat of will power, Peggy triumphs over the urge to fidget in her seat the entire flight. It’s been nearly a month since she’d last seen Steve, and the anticipation of their reunion conjures up all types of reckless ideas. The reminder of her career and reputation are the only things keeping a sensible thought in her head. 

She decides to preoccupy the time by running through Steve’s letters, all half a dozen of them which had managed to reach her in the intervening weeks. His handwriting is as flawless as one would expect of a talented artist. Crisp lines. Subtle curves. But it’s the words that make Peggy falter more than anything. “ _Fate brought us to each other, Peg, I’m sure of it. When life hands you something like this, something this important, you don’t let go. I don’t plan on letting go.”_

For a man that took over a year to put his feelings into words, he is no longer holding back. She finds she doesn’t mind in the least, a little lovesick as she stares at the parchment in her hands. 

But when they arrive at the airstrip, Steve is notably absent. She tries to hide her crushing disappointment, but when Phillips disappears to get a sit-rep and returns a few minutes later, she can read the tension in his shoulders. 

“Captain Rogers is in route to Austria,” Phillips explains. “News arrived of Dr. Zola traveling onboard a _Schnellzug_ train. Barnes, board back on the plane. It’ll rendezvous with Captain Rogers outside of Liechtenstein. You have orders to bring back the son of a bitch, dead or alive.”

The mention of Zola puts some starch in Bucky’s spine. “With pleasure, sir.” He’s off faster than a blink of an eye.

Peggy turns to Phillips. “Colonel, permission to—”

“Denied,” Phillips cuts in. “I need you back here on base, running logistics.”

“Sir, with due respect—”

“I don’t care if you’re testing off the charts, Agent,” he barks over her. “Letting a soulbonded pair work together on the frontline is just asking for trouble. You wanted back in the field, you’ve got it. Hell, I’ll even let you lead your own team if you’re as sensational as the docs say. But it’ll be far away from Captain Rogers and his men. Is that understood?”

“You’re making a mistake, Colonel. I’m an asset in the field. Use me. I have just as much qualifications to be out there as any of his men. Some might argue more.”

“You saw how crazed Rogers got when you were wounded in those mountains? I am not letting personal feelings get in the way of mission parameters.”

“If you’ll remember,” Peggy counters, “I was also the one to get him back in line.” 

That curtails some of Phillips' ire. “I’m not saying you’re a bad influence on him. Hell, you might even be good for him, but we’ve got too much at stake here.”

“All the more reasons to put your best soldiers forward,” Peggy argues, stepping forward. 

It’s a bold declaration, but Peggy feels it in her bones, knows she’s proven herself to Phillips a dozen times over the years. It wasn’t easy being plucked from obscurity and working her way into the SSR. Peggy hadn’t managed it because of a pretty smile.

Phillips points a finger at her. “This _one_ mission, a test run.”

“Thank you, sir, you won’t regret it,” Peggy assures, already gathering her things.

“I better not,” Phillips barks. “And keep an eye on Barnes’ arm, too. I still don’t trust he healed right.”

“Will do,” she promises.

(It’s a promise that she’ll break, unfortunately.) 

#

They’ve barely landed when Peggy is already up, gathering her things at lightning speed. 

The ramp drops open, letting in a gust of ice-cold air – and there’s a strong presence at her back, she can feel it in her bones. For a still second afterwards, Peggy freezes and can’t find her legs. She braces herself with a slow inhale, and then turns around to find Steve halted at the foot of the ramp, slightly out of breath, like he’d been running some great distance to greet the plane. He’s staring at her as openly as she is staring back. His uniform is muddied, hair disheveled and sticking up in tuffs, a sign he recently used his infamous wings-motif helmet. His shield is securely fastened at his back, and his sidearm locked in the holster she’d seen him clip a thousand times. It isn’t fair that his uniform does him so much justice, a sight so enticing she has to remind herself of the strict necessity of oxygen.

His perceptive eyes take her in, and she should feel frumpy, standing there in her green blazer and a borrowed pair of paratrooper trousers, ready for combat, but he looks at her like she’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

“Captain Rogers,” she manages, thankfully, to control her voice.

He stops a few feet before her. “Agent Carter,” he returns. 

“Oh, sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Bucky mutters from behind, exasperated. Peggy forgot that he’d been there. “The pining looks are somehow _worse._ I didn’t think that was possible.”

Peggy glances away, feeling herself flush, and knows without looking that Steve is as red as a beet. Schoolchildren, the lot of them.

Bucky trudges past them, slapping Steve hard on the shoulder once as he goes. “Kiss her, you damn fool.”

They’re left alone, and Peggy tries to maintain some dignity, but it’s a failing battle. Steve clears his throat, but his eyes drop, fixated on her lips, and she nearly laughs.

“I believe,” she says softly, “the sergeant gave you an order.”

His lips twitch up in a smile. “Bucky doesn’t outrank me, but I suppose an order is an order.”

“Indeed,” she replies tartly.

He steps up and kisses her, and for a moment, just one, all is right with the world.

#

But their mission goes horribly, horribly wrong.

They’ve managed to dead drop onto the moving train with no issues, a feat in and off itself, but Peggy barely feels winded. She barely even feels the frost, actually, and she’s never been one to fair the cold weather well, despite hailing from London. She moves through the train, trailing behind Steve and Bucky, with the rest of the Commandos moving on top of the train. Peggy marches past a shipment of weapons, boxes of artillery and something likely worse, when the doors between the compartments slid shut, trapping her and Bucky in one room and Steve in another.

“Stop him!” Zola’s voice comes over the intercom, confirming his presence on board. “Fire!”

One of Red Skull’s men emerge from the shadows, wearing some type of advanced bodysuit that Peggy has never seen before. Blue lights illuminate the thick metal suit, complete with a custom machine gun that volleys a barrage of bullets. Even as she manages to duck and return fire, the suit raises flags. She’s reminded of Agoston’s claims, the woman in a futuristic suit; Red Skull’s men certainly have body armor beyond anything Peggy has ever seen.

But there’s no time for that, because Bucky is right behind her with his sidearm at the ready, firing off a quick crack that hits the guard square in the chest. He doesn’t go down, though, volleying back a violent blue blast that cuts through the compartment.

“Shoot them!” Zola’s voice comes on the intercom again, demanding. “But capture one alive if you can!”

Peggy narrows her eyes, knowing Zola’s intentions have everything to do with further experimentation. She kicks out at one of the crates, driving it back with such a force it collides with Zola’s man. He’s shoved back into the wall, and Peggy springs into action, slamming the guard in the face with the backend of her rifle so that the visor shoots up, revealing the face underneath. She blasts the man at pointblank range.

“Nice,” Bucky supplies, appreciatively.

Before she can comment, Steve breaks through the compartment, battling another one of Red Skull’s men. A blazing blue fire shoots through the air, ripping apart the train. Bucky is flung out the gaping hole, and Steve cries out, already chasing after him onto the broken ledge.

“Hold on!” Steve screams at Bucky.

Peggy looks out, sees Bucky hanging onto a loose railing with the one arm recently cast – and worse, the rush of the snow-covered cavern and river below them. She spots something in the distance, down below, a spec of red and blue glinting against the backdrop of pure white, but Steve’s cry brings her back to him. It all happens so fast.

Bucky plummets into the cavern, a dead man’s scream echoing through the air.

#

She sends a coded message through back channels to Phillips.

 _MISSION OBJECTIVE ACCOMPLISHED. PACKAGE INTERCEPTED ALIVE. DEEPLY REGRET INFORM YOU SERGENT JAMES BARNES OFFICIALLY REPORTED KILLED IN ACTION November 8, 1944. NO BODY RECOVERED._

Afterwards, Peggy Carter secludes herself and allows herself a good cry, the type she hasn't allowed herself since news came of her brother.

#

She finds Steve in an abandoned barn about a klick from the base camp. Peggy picks her way through the clutter, at last finding him sitting in a lonesome chair near the stables. Steve notices her before she even makes it near; of course, he does. She isn’t even entirely sure how she found him, other than her instincts. It might be the soulbond working; it might just be her intuition. 

Steve reaches for a drink, eyes red and fatigued, a twin crease settling deep between his eyebrows. "Dr. Erskine said that the serum wouldn't just effect my muscles,” his voice sounds rough, like he’s been eating raw glass, but all she finds is a bottle of whiskey in his hands. “It would affect my cells. Create a protective system of regeneration and healing. Which means, um…” he shakes his head, ruefully. “I can't get drunk. Did you know that?"

She finds a stool and turns it over, sitting. “Your metabolism burns four times faster than the average person. He thought it could be one of the side effects."

She’s never seen him look so lost. Through thick and thin, through death and defeat, Steve has always managed to maintain a level of composure and even optimism that has been as unfailing as it is comforting. But she remembers losing Michael, remembers too much of the pain. Losing a brother isn’t something that heals, not really. 

“It wasn’t your fault, Steve.”

“You were there,” he tells her, taking another swig of his useless drink. “You know that’s not true.”

She has never doubted that he is stronger than any ten men alive, but grief is a notorious bog of self-recrimination and memorials. Of course, Steve shoulders more responsibility than he is due.

“You did everything you could,” she tells him, reaching out a hand to press over his. That astonishing current is still there, humming at their briefest touch, but it’s dulled, like the energy is slowly seeping out of it. “Did you trust your friend? Did you respect him? Then stop blaming yourself. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must have thought you were worth it.”

“Peg,” he says, voice breaking. “He’s always been by my side. I don’t know if I can do this without him.”

“Oh, my darling,” she says, heart fracturing. She pulls him into a hug, and he buries his face into the crook of her neck. His frame engulfs her, but somehow, he seems smaller, a flicker of his former self, this one smelling of whiskey. “You won’t be alone.” 

For the longest time, she just holds him, hoping it’s enough to let him know that she is there for him. That she plans on staying by his side for as long as she has breath in her. Truth be told, Peggy has always been stubborn in committing herself to anything, even something as obvious as a forgone conclusion written with ink on her skin. This is the moment, though, the exact moment that Peggy would recall for ages and ages to come, that she realizes she _wants_ it too. Plainly desires it in a way that even with a gun to her head, it couldn’t convince her to renounce it. 

It isn’t a decision made without her consent, her falling for this man. It is, however, as easy as an inhale and exhale, a beat between breathes.

She lifts his head and coaxes a kiss from him – gentle, a small probe of lips against lips. Meant to be comforting, an offer of solace. Her entire soul aches with the idea of him in agony, and she only wants to make it better somehow.

But he takes over the kiss as quick as a blink, pushing her back. Deepening it, a harsh sound passing through his constricted throat, and the next thing she knows, he’s edged her back until her spine hits the wall. His hand digs into her hip, another pushing into her curls. His possessive touch is fueled by a surge of emotion, a colorful bruising of lust and loss, the toll of desperation.

“Steve,” she warns in a breathless whisper.

There is forever a charge between them now, and it tends to get away from them quickly. It’s been weeks since he’s touched her like this, and only then a handful of times; it defies logic how desperately her body responds to his. She should stop this before they get carried away, or at least wait until there isn’t heartache hanging between them.

But he says her name in a husky whisper, half asking for permission, half broken under the weight of the day – and her throat closes off. She just wants to make him _feel_ better, anything to jolt this desperate pain away, even for a moment.

She puts a hand on his cheek, brings his unfocused eyes to meet hers. The look in his robs her breath. “Tell me what you need, Steve.”

In response Steve just kisses her again, hot and slick, nothing tender or sweet like his kisses before. Intense and heated, she feels lightheaded, her skin flames on a fire. He makes this brittle noise from the back of his throat that makes her eyes squeeze shut. She knows she owns him, body and soul, and she knows him in a way that no one else ever could. This truth has given her a secret, darkly possessive comfort from time to time. Just as much as the fact that she knows she's his in all the ways she could possibly think of. 

They're kissing so desperately that Peggy has to remind herself to breathe. There’s a wooden post hanging from the wall near her head, and Peggy blindly reaches out to ring her hand around it, steadying herself as she hitches herself higher. She can feel him fumbling underneath her skirt and resolves to help him by shimming out of her undergarments, so they fall to the barnyard floor. 

For a moment, their eyes connect, and Steve’s dark gaze has her pinned. There is barely any talking. They’re still almost fully clothed. It’s all rushed. In all her idle fantasies and active speculations, she never thought it would come out in this sort of way. A part of her wants to lean in, let the momentum of this moment build and shape into a frenzy, but she doesn’t want this to be gone too quickly either. 

“I should,” he breathes, stammering, licking his lips, “I wanted it to be better than this, our first time. You deserve better than this.”

“Oh, my love,” she smiles at him. “All that matters is that I’m with you.”

Even still, Steve hesitates, resting against her. “Are you—" he begins, “should I?”

She doesn’t know what he means to ask; she doubts he does either, precisely. But it’s obvious he’s asking some form of permission – and they’ve waited long enough. 

She grabs the back of his neck and pulls him into a kiss. She can hear Steve unbuckling his belt, but it’s the immediate jolt of him pressing against her that has Peggy swallowing hard, back pressed against the wall. It’s the _size_ of him that catches her by surprise, not that she should have expected otherwise. She’s already wet with anticipation, and she knows that Steve can barely hold back, desperation and urgency dominating his usual self-control. Peggy knows it’ll be a heedless start this time, but that’s okay; they’ll have time for slow later.

Peggy simply hitches both legs over his hips, trusting that he’ll catch and support her when the same position would have driven lesser men to their knees. He grabs the back of her thighs, easily lifting her; Steve’s broad shoulders are a solid weight beneath her grip, readjusting as he first pushes her up against the wall, then slowly, firmly, inside her. A soft gasp escapes her lips as she takes him in. 

Steve stills, and they stay like that for a beat, just resting, one of his hands adjusting to brace under her thigh and the other gripping the wooden post near her head. There's an all-consuming feeling building inside, lust and love and something uniquely their soulbond, running down her spine, throughout her body. She can almost taste it on her lips. Peggy wraps her legs around him more securely, and squeezes in encouragement. The wooden post crumbles in his hand like it’s made of dust. 

"Jesus, Peg," he hisses, eyes slamming shut, and then he’s thrusting into her heavily. His breath is hot and humid against her skin, a strange mix of musk, mud and gunpowder, and she hates that she loves that scent so much. Hates that even now, even at their lowest point, she can’t get enough of him no matter what state he’s in. 

Threading her fingers through his hair, Peggy wrenches his head back so that he can kiss her, and Steve obliges, of course, kissing her hungerly before trailing kisses down her face, over her neckline, where he ends up burying his face into her neck as he thrusts. Peggy swallows her moans at first, before she realizes every little sound she makes only emboldens him. 

Between kisses, he keeps saying her name in this little dark whisper, and – she can tell he’s already close, chasing his release with a desperate pursuit. Movement becomes erratic as he nears the end, and then Steve comes with a deep growl against her skin, spilling his release into her. He collapses against her, hot breaths panting through the curls of her hair. 

Because she needs it, so close to the edge that she can taste it, she guides his fingers under her skirt, showing him how to touch her until she’s coming so blindingly hard, she nearly blacks out.

Steve sets her down gently, so very, very gently given how he’d been thus far. She can barely feel her legs, trembling as she lands on solid ground again, needing Steve’s strong sturdy frame to steady herself. Her clothes are disheveled, but when she tries to pull away to fix herself, Steve pulls her to his chest. In a state of post-coital glow, he holds her for a long time. How long they stay like that, she doesn’t know. Long enough that she wishes they had a bed and some guaranteed privacy. She realizes someone might come searching for them, even as far off in seclusion as they are. 

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She almost laughs against him. “Whatever on Earth for, darling?”

She can’t imagine he has anything to apologize for after that performance.

“You deserve romance,” he tells her. “You deserve more than this. I had so much planned for our first night, Peg.”

She pulls back to smile at him. “Oh, Steve. You really are so dramatic sometimes. We have the rest of our lives.”

“The rest of our lives?” His eyes light up. “I like the sound of that.”

She hums in agreement.

“I love you, Peg,” Steve breathes.

She dusts a hand across his cheek. “I love you too, my darling.”

#

As they walk back to the base camp, she suspects they’ll receive a round of knowing glances. Any other day, they would have been teased – or at very least, Steve – but today has left the team striped of the normal banter, and she almost wishes for the ribbing. What she wouldn’t give to stare down Bucky’s knowing grin at that moment. Her heart aches with the thought. 

But when they make it back to camp, there’s an energy to the place she isn’t expecting. “Captain, Carter, come quick!” Dum Dum urges. “You won’t believe it! Barnes is alive!”

“What?” Steve demands, startled.

“Someone dropped him off a while ago,” Dum Dum says, sounding incredulous himself. “He’s in bad shape, but they gave him medical attention, patched him up as best they could.”

“Who? Where is he?”

“I’ll take you to Barnes,” Dum Dum says, already leading the way. “As for who helped him, hell if anyone knows. He was just left outside the med-tent, and Barnes is too out of it to say who helped him.”

Even as Peggy feels hope flicker alive, she doesn’t believe it until they find Bucky in the med-tent. The medic is already looking at Bucky’s wounds, blood-soiled bandages everywhere. Steve rushes forward, and Peggy forces herself to wait back by the entrance with Dum Dum, knowing a crowded tent wouldn’t help with the medical attention Bucky needs. She watches as Steve tries to urge him oldest friend awake.

“He looks a mess,” Dum Dum says. “Still, it’s a miracle that he’s alive.”

“Yes,” Peggy says demurely, thinking of who could possibly have saved him. Summoned blearily, she remembers that flash of red and blue, that mysterious glimmer in the snow just before Bucky fell. Had someone been down there? “A miracle.”

She watches as Bucky comes to, groggily, groaning as he exchanges a few words with Steve. She should be too far away to hear anything, but her ears unexpectedly pick up Bucky’s urgent whispers. Steve tries to calm him down, to get him to lay back down, but Bucky looks determined even in his fever. Something’s off, something important enough that Bucky struggles against Steve.

“Where is she?” he is saying, blearily. “Is she still here?”

“Who?” Steve asks.

“Peg,” Bucky answers. 

Though surprising to be asked for, the words draw Peggy forward. “There, there, Barnes,” she says, soothingly. “Rest now. You need rest.”

“You—” he manages, before falling back onto the cot with a groan.

“Easy there, Buck, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Steve says, looking worried.

But Bucky persists, delirious, “How did— you, you were there— you...”

“You have to get him to calm down,” the medic says. “We may have to amputate his arm. Hold him still!”

Steve looks pained as he restrains Bucky. “What happened, Buck? What are you trying to say?”

“Peggy,” he finally manages. “She was there, in the river. She—she saved me.”

#


	4. Chapter 4

#

Peggy silently follows Steve and Dum Dum outside the med-tent, trying to process everything. It feels like the weight of the entire day has come crashing down around her, and there have been too many things happening, too many conflicting emotions. 

Steve finally finds his voice, it seems, as he turns towards Dum Dum. “Call in an air lift. I want Bucky out of here ASAP.” Dum Dum nods once, about to take off, before Steve adds, “And double the guards around Zola. There’s someone unknown in these woods. Maybe a friendly, maybe not. Let’s not take any chances.”

“Sure thing, Cap,” Dum Dum says, and leaves.

Steve looks towards the tent with a thousand yard stare, and it doesn’t take her soulbond to spot the anxiety coming off him in waves. The medic and his team are already working on Bucky, trying to salvage his arm, but from the grim little Peggy had seen in there, it might be a lost cause.

Bucky’s declaration about Peggy, then, should be easy to dismiss. He was in pain, delirious, in ten types of agony. He didn’t know what he was saying. Obviously, she wasn’t the one to save him. No one even questioned that, because they all knew Peggy had been with the Commandos the entire day, and then with Steve for the remainder of the night. 

Somehow, though, it isn’t that easy to shake his words.

“I should start the search,” Steve says, moving to grab his shield. “We need to find whoever is out there—”

Peggy steps into his path. “Others can mount the search. You need to be here for your friend.”

Steve is shaking his head. “I’m no good to him sitting on my hands.”

“And Bucky may be in there losing one of his own,” Peggy counters, firmly. “He’s going to need his friend when he wakes up. I’ll look for whoever is out there—”

“Peg—” Steve cuts himself off almost as soon as he starts.

Peggy knows what he wants, without him saying it. He needs her by his side. Still, there’s a potential enemy combatant out there, although all evidence thus far points to a friendly. They can’t take the chance. 

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Peggy promises, pressing a gentle kiss to the corner of his lips. “But duty first, Captain.”

He closes his eyes, exhales, and nods because he knows it, both of them do. 

She squeezes his hand once, and then turns to mount a rifle over her shoulder. 

#

They find a pair of footprints in the snow not far from the backend of the med-tent, but it’s one among a dozen, all trampled over each other. The footprints disappear quickly, as if someone had deliberately covered it up, but Peggy studies the size, noting that it matches her own. She’s positive she’s never been to that area before, and no one else in camp has feet as small as hers. 

It’s lucky they even have a med-tent and medical supplies; the base camp leaves a lot to be desired, erected as an ad-hoc facility between missions, but Peggy suspects whoever deposited Bucky there had been aware of the provisions. That meant someone within the military, someone who knows how the Howling Commandos operate. 

The search through the woods is tedious, and mostly comes up empty. At one point, she swears she can feel the prickle of someone’s eyes on her, but no matter how hard she looks, she finds nothing – and her eyesight has improved again, by leaps, perhaps another byproduct of sleeping with Steve? The soulbond connection has been roundly established now, she knows – _permanently._ Peggy stores it all away, another tally to the list of things to contemplate about later when she has the time and opportunity; like the fact that she tolerates the cold now as barely imperceptible, or that she moves twice as fast as any of the Commandos, all of whom are far more experienced in these types of terrains. She’s tempted to test her strength, but they’ll have time for that all later.

Once it’s confirmed that the search is useless, she returns to Steve, finding him exactly where she left him. Waiting outside the med-tent with tension so heavy-set in his shoulders that his profile looks like a statue. 

Steve turns when he sees her approaching. “You think this is somehow a HYDRA trap?”

She can hear him trying to control the fear in his voice, as if merely entertaining the idea makes his stomach churn. Peggy thinks it over for a moment. Bucky being returned to them so miraculously should raise suspicions, but her gut instincts tell her HYDRA’s nefariousness isn’t behind this. 

“I don’t think so,” she tells him. “I can’t imagine what they’d gain with it. He was gone for less than a day barely.”

“They did things to him,” Steve confesses, “when the 107th was captured.”

“I know.”

“He still gets nightmares.” 

“I know,” Peggy says softly, because she is achingly familiar with this fact. 

“Peg,” he says, and finally some life comes back into his voice. “Bucky’s _alive_.”

She smiles, softly. “I know.”

He steps closer to her, and instinctively they reach for one another so that Steve can kiss her. Peggy managed to keep her distance from him for over a year, avoiding any contact whatsoever through great mental and physical restraint, but already she can tell keeping their hands to themselves will be an impossible chore after just one night together. He eventually rests his forehead against hers, closing his eyes, and Peggy wants this to be as perfect as a miracle as they’re both praying for. Bucky, alive and well, hopefully able to fully recover. At the same time, the memory of his ashen face and blood-soiled shirt is stark in her mind.

When they pull apart, Steve sighs, saying, “You were right.”

“About what?”

“I am not good with idle hands. I need something to do.”

Peggy lifts an eyebrow. “It sounds like something I would say, but I don’t ever recall saying that to you, Steve.”

“Yeah, you did. A few hours ago.”

Peggy thinks back, shaking her head. “No, I’m fairly sure our night together did not involve me having any complaints about your hands being _idle._ ” 

Steve’s face flushes a little. “No, not that,” he says, though he looks the slightest bit pleased. “I’m talking about a few hours before that. In the woods out back.”

Peggy is staring at him with open confusion. “When?”

There’s a brief flash of bewilderment on Steve’s face, and then growing unease. “You and me, we talked in the woods a few hours ago. You told me to go take a walk. Told me you’d catch up with me.”

“Steve,” Peggy replies, a bit alarmed. “I never had that conversation with you.” 

The sound of an air carrier approaching interrupts them. The noise draws open the med-tent flap, and a blood-stained medic pokes his head out. “Oh, thank god. We gotta move quick.”

Although it’s clear their priority needs to be with Bucky, to help gather the supplies and get him onto the carrier, Peggy feels unnerved. Even while rushing to get everything in order, she makes it a point to tuck the conversation away for a later revisit.

#

Back in civilization, they wait on news from Bucky’s surgery in a sterile London hospital. Peggy and Steve sit quietly in those uncomfortable stiff chairs next to each other, and Steve’s foot taps an impatient rhythm full of restless energy. He hates being useless, and she can feel the waves of frustration coming off him in waves, but there’s a pregnant silence hanging between them, full of wrought energy that doesn’t entirely have to do with Bucky. Peggy puts her hand on Steve’s thigh, stilling him, and the tapping ceases. 

“It was you,” Steve insists, out of the blue, but she knows exactly what he’s referring to. “We had a whole conversation, Peg. You told me I couldn’t keep idle hands, so I should go for a walk, clear my head. You told me you’d find me. How can you not remember that?”

“Because we never had that conversation,” Peggy tells him, just as insistent. She’s been contemplating this for a while. “I think… I think we may have to confront the idea that someone is out there, impersonating me. What else did you discuss?”

“Nothing, really. You told me to go for a walk, that I needed to clear my head.” 

He’s repeating himself. He’s being uncharacteristically _restrained._

Peggy stops breathing for a moment, turning to face him. “Did you kiss her, Steve?”

Steve’s eyes fly up to meet hers. “You mean did I kiss _you_?”

It isn’t the outright denial she’d been hoping for. They stare at each other, and Peggy has the dawning slick realization that he _did_ – kiss this woman parading around with her face. A torrent of dark emotions course through her, and she snatches back her hand and stands up, needing to distance herself from Steve. 

Indignation floods her, because it’s like finding him kissing Lorraine behind those shelves all over again. Except it’s worse, because instead of kissing some random woman shamelessly throwing herself at him, Steve had been duped into kissing Peggy’s imposter. He should have known better than that! She thought he knew her better than anyone. For heaven’s sake, it had only been hours since she’d trusted him so completely enough that she slept with him. Humiliation and anger runs rampant through her like wildfire.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, and she has to remind herself to stay calm, to stay collected. Around them, a pair of nurses are pretending to flip through some charts, whispering to each other quietly, but their eyes dart up quickly to soak in Captain America in veiled appreciation; Peggy has to clamp down on the urge to throw something against a wall. “What else happened?”

“Nothing,” Steve answers quickly, scrambling to his feet. He keeps his voice at an urgent whisper, crowding around Peggy while he desperately explains, “I left, and you found me in the barn an hour later. You know what happened after that.”

“Steve,” she manages through gritted teeth, because she’s more than a little offended and disturbed by how far this imposter’s charade went. “After we got back from the train, I dispatched an update to Phillips. I didn’t see you until hours later, at the barn. Whoever you talked to, _kissed_ , it wasn’t me.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if you allow for the possibility that you were fooled by an imposter.”

It’s the only thing that makes sense out of Bucky’s ramblings and Steve’s assertions. There is a woman out there with the skills and ability to fool the people around her, the people that know her best. That has larger implications outside of Steve’s apparently indiscriminating lips. She may need to report this to Phillips.

Steve is silent for a long beat, but then he’s shaking his head. “No, Peg, I know you. I can feel when you’re around. I can spot your scent among a dozen others—”

“My _scent?”_ she repeats, incredulous.

“—and I am telling you, as sure as I am standing here breathing, I was talking to you. I kissed _you!_ ”

“I think I would remember that!” Peggy snaps back.

Their voices have risen loud enough that the nurses are openly staring. She offers them a cold stare, and they both straighten, quickly walking away in an act best befitting their self-preservation. 

“Peggy.” Steve catches her by the arm and whirls her around to face him. “I may be a complete buffoon talking to women, but I know you. I love you. I can sketch you with my eyes closed. I wasn’t being fooled. That woman, I could feel her through my soulbond.” 

That stills Peggy.

She lifts her eyes to his, saying nothing, feeling a whole host of conflicting emotions. 

The sound of someone clearing their throat interrupts the moment. Bucky’s surgeon is standing there, clipboard in hand, coat speckled with blood. Both Peggy and Steve straighten, but fail to separate. The doctor delivers the horrible news; Peggy can barely register the words over the mounting dread she can sense rising off Steve. True to her suspicions, the doctors had to amputate Bucky’s left arm. Steve quietly absorbs the news without saying a word, but Peggy can already tell he feels like a grenade with the pin pulled. Whatever tension hanging between them can take a backseat to more pressing concerns. Peggy steps closer to Steve, taking his hand in hers.

“Can I see him, doc?” Steve asks, gripping her hand like it's a lifeline.

“He’ll be out for a few more hours yet,” the doctor replies, “but you can wait by his bedside. Only one visitor at a time, though.”

“Go,” Peggy urges him. “It should be you.”

Steve brings the back of her hand to his lips, pressing a quick kiss. “I guess we’ll continue this conversation later?”

“I’m fairly sure the topic will come up again, yes.”

Steve looks as suitably thrilled with the prospect as one would suspect. “I’ll keep you updated on Bucky.”

“Go,” she tells him, and reluctantly he leaves.

#

She spends the next few hours taking inventory and stock at the SSR headquarters. While Phillips busies himself with Zola’s interrogation, Peggy pulls the blueprints, plans and research notes taken from him at capture. There are drawings of a curious blue cube he describes as “the tesseract,” and something else too, something that reminds her of the red floating liquid that Howard and Agoston’s team had dubbed “Substance X.” Apparently, both ethereal objects are of interest to Schmidt, which makes them both of interest to Peggy. 

She decides to further investigate. Dr. Agoston’s office is on the sixth floor, and she decides to introduce herself, bracing for the eccentric personality that Howard had warned her about; still, his immediate reaction to Peggy's proffered handshake raises alarms. 

“You!” he gapes, pulling back, stumbling so hard it sends a beaker full of yellow liquid crashing to the floor. “Stay back! Guards! Guards!”

“Dr. Agoston, calm down,” she tries. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

He laughs, a little hysterically. “That’s what you said the last time.”

Already, she knows where this nonsense is going. 

Already, she is rather tired of dealing with it.

Peggy tries to use a calming voice. “I only need to talk to you about Substance X, and the woman who took it. The woman who I now suspect looks remarkably similar to me.”

Agoston isn’t paying attention. He backs away, frantic to get away from her to the point where he stumbles upon the spilled yellow liquid, slips, legs flying towards the ceiling, and knocks himself unconscious on the floor. She rushes to his side.

“Well,” Peggy remarks to herself, frowning. “This was productive.”

#

The next stop is to Howard’s office, on the eighth floor.

“I need you to study the surveillance video,” she tells him, without so much as a hello, “of the night Substance X was taken.”

“Why?” Howard asks, confused. “We already know Dr. Agoston blew it up.”

“He also mentioned a woman in a strange suit took it.”

“But the video already proves—”

“Check again,” Peggy demands. “I have a feeling the video was tampered with.”

“What makes you think that?” Howard asks.

“Instincts,” she replies. “And a heavily concussed astrophysicist two floors below.”

#

When she arrives back to the hospital, the nurses inform her that Bucky’s room is down the corridor, the second door on the left. She taps lightly on the door, before stepping in. Bucky is laid out on the bed, conscious, but grimacing. The bandages on his left arm, nothing more than a stump now, have been recently dressed. He nods briefly by way of greeting, as a nurse takes his blood pressure. There is no sign of Steve.

“I made him get some rest, go home,” Bucky tells her, reading her face. “Or at least what you two were calling home here in London before I crashed on the couch.”

“Ah, yes,” Peggy acknowledges, clearing her throat. She knew the SSR still retained the flat under their assumed aliases, Betty and Grant Carver. “I’m astonished you managed to get him to leave. He was beside himself with worry over you.”

Bucky practically rolls his eyes. “Steve’s a pushover if you know the right words. Just made him promise to do something for me, something that’ll make me feel better. The idiot agreed before I even had to say what it was. Then I told him I wanted him to go home and get some rest. It’s an old trick, but Steve falls for it every time.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Peggy offers tartly. She waits until the nurse finishes her work and leaves, before pulling up a chair to his bedside. “How are you doing?” 

Bucky shrugs, not an answer either way. “Bad luck.”

He utters this so dispassionately, as if losing an arm happened to someone else. It isn’t an easy thing, going through something as traumatic as this. Men have fallen into drink and despair dealing with far less. Peggy wonders just how this will affect him, given she’s suspected Bucky’s mental health has never fully recovered from Zola’s experimentations and captivity.

Speaking of, she feels compelled to inform Bucky of developing SSR news. “Zola is cooperating with Phillips, after some convincing. It appears we might be able to gain some insight into Schmidt’s plans. They’re still taking down all the information, but rest assured, that man will not be experimenting on unfortunate souls ever again.” 

Surely, that figures as good news, but Bucky merely nods his head, looking tired.

He clearly doesn’t want to talk. Understandable, of course. The man’s been through so much in the last twenty-four hours. She tries to coax his dark eyes to meet hers, show some semblance of humanity before turning to business, but she can tell he isn’t in the mood for her sympathy. She needs to be quick with her questioning, then. Right to business.

Peggy clears her throat. “I know this is a hard time, Sergeant, but I wanted to clarify a few things—”

“Steve already told me,” Bucky cuts in. “And yeah, it was you. Same hair, same face, same damn accent. You pulled me out of the water, Peg, dragged me to the shore. Patched me up. You saved my life.”

“Although I am forever grateful you were saved, I can assure you it was not me.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, presumably because he’s already had this conversation with Steve and doesn’t want to repeat himself. 

Peggy feels indelicate as she presses, “Is there anything else you can tell me about her?”

“Yeah,” he says. “She had Steve’s shield.”

Peggy reels back in her chair. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yep, the same one, I could tell. Reverberated and defied the laws of gravity the same way Steve’s does. You—she, _whoever_ , handled it like she knew what she was doing with it.”

Peggy doesn’t know what to say to that, because that’s almost as inconceivable as the accusations of doppelgangers. Steve’s shield is a composite of proto-adamantium, a combination of vibranium and steel alloy. Howard consumed the only supply of vibranium known to mankind making that shield. If he was here right now, she was sure Howard would tell them it would be easier to duplicate a human’s face than it would be to replicate that shield.

Except, as Peggy recalls, there had been a red and blue glint in the snow, just before Bucky had fallen. Peggy had seen it with her own two eyes.

“Look, Peg, I know you’ve got questions. Trust me, so do I. But I’ve already told this all to Steve. I’m tired, and—”

“Yes, of course,” she says, lifting to her feet. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Ain’t a bother,” Bucky clarifies. “Just bad timing. I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Peggy replies, moving back to the door. She stops as her hand hits the doorknob, turning back just once. “It’s good to see you awake, in any case. The world would have been far less interesting with you gone, Sergeant.” 

He offers her a smile, or one equivocating whatever he can muster in that moment. “What’d I tell ya, Peg? My friends call me Bucky.”

#

It rains all day and night, making everything cold and dreary. Peggy takes a cab back to the flat, soaking wet and irritated as soon as she steps one foot out of the vehicle. She uses a newspaper to keep the deluge away, but it’s flimsy and useless. Her mood sours with every step taken, but the truth is, it has very little to do with the weather. She is still angry with Steve, and she knows she probably shouldn’t be. They have so many other concerns, a kiss hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t as if Steve had been psychic, either, no matter the soulbond between them. From all accounts, the imposter is a dead ringer for Peggy. Still, she thought it wasn’t just physical between them. She had felt... _something_ from him the night before, shared something so vital and crucial, something far more important than base sex. 

Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps all men just looked for a pretty smile. It’s an uncharitable and slightly puerile response, and she knows – _knows_ – that Steve isn’t truly like that. But Peggy can’t kick the petulant feeling.

She manages to get the door open to her flat, charging in furiously with a sopping wet newspaper, before she stops short, surprised to find candlelight everywhere. There’s music piped in over the radio, a slow song that takes Peggy a moment to recognize. She can smell dinner cooking.

At her noisy entrance, Steve comes out of the kitchen wearing an apron that has a stain of red sauce across the front. “You’re back,” he says.

Peggy feels like she’s walked into someone else’s life. “What—”

“I thought,” he says, cheeks brightening red, “we gotta eat, right? Might as well enjoy some ambiance.”

He told her the prior night that he’d wished he’d done romance, done something special for their first night together. She told him they had the rest of their lives for that. 

Apparently, he’s taking her up on the offer. 

But Peggy isn’t in the mood. “Steve,” she sighs. “This is lovely, truly. But we haven’t slept in two days, and I’m exhausted.”

Steve’s lips force an understanding smile. “You sure you don’t wanna eat?”

“Positive,” she says, shortly. 

He must read the recrimination coming off her in waves. “You’re still angry about the kiss.”

It truly is remarkable that Steve has learned so much, and still, at times, says the exact wrong thing to her. Despite all her lessons, he still hasn’t learned what not to say to women. Instead of dignifying his words with a response or acknowledging the romantic candlelight dinner as an obvious overture to an apology, Peggy marches to the bedroom to change into warm things. 

Outside the bedroom door, she can hear Steve turn off the radio. She expects he has taken the hint and would be returning to their old sleeping arrangements from before, with him on the couch. The sound of the dishes being put away, the stove being turned off, give her only the slightest pause before she’s closing herself off in the tub. She takes a bath in tepid warm water, because hot water is hard to come by these days, but the temperature hardly registers to her anymore. 

When she comes back out of the bathroom, she’s surprised to find him sitting on the bed. “I think,” he says, calmly, and she knows that voice; it’s the voice he gets when he’s about to lay out a strategy in battle, “that we need to talk.”

She’s wearing nothing but an off-white terry-cloth bathrobe. “And I think I need to change into clothes.”

He raises an eyebrow, presses his lips together, and nods. Slowly, he rises and turns his back to the room, facing the door, so that she can change without his eyes on her. It’s a bold move for a man that breathes chivalry with every exhale, but he’s not backing down like she expected him to. A defiant part of her wants to protest and send him out the door, another part doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. 

She rummages through the rack of clothing, pulling something out without much consideration, and drops the bathrobe to the floor. There’s a mirror in the corner, but she knows Steve would never look, even if they’ve already slept together. He’s technically never seen her naked before, not fully. The way things are running in her head tonight, he’ll have to wait a bit longer.

“Okay, turn around,” she tells him when she’s decent, in a soft pink nightgown. Because it’s far too light and flimsy for her mood, she pulls on her white bathrobe over it. “What is it you want to talk about?”

“Peg,” he says softly. “I’ve been trying to figure how to phrase it all day, and frankly, I’m still short on words. I swear I didn’t know it wasn’t you. To be honest, I’m still not entirely convinced it wasn’t.”

“Oh, this again,” she fumes, and storms out of the bedroom.

He follows her. “I could feel your rage coming up three flights of stairs. I can sense your mood before you can even identify it yourself. And I know you probably feel the same with me.”

She doesn’t deny it. Being attuned to his emotions has become so second-nature to her that Peggy hardly even registers it as strange anymore.

“Your point?”

“I could feel that with her yesterday,” Steve says. “I don’t think we’re dealing with an imposter. I think we’re dealing with the real thing.”

“By ‘the real thing,’ do you perchance mean _me_? Because once again, I think I would be the leading authority on that.” 

“Look, I can’t explain it. I can’t even wrap my head around how it could be remotely possible. But I’d lay my life down on it. I have this funny feeling I’m actually doing that right now, just having this argument, but that woman was you, Peg. Somehow, someway. I know it’s insane—”

“No, it’s _impossible_.”

“No,” he counters, firmly. “What’s impossible is for me to kiss someone, anyone else in the entire world, and mistake it for Peggy Carter. I _know_ when I’m kissing Peggy Carter.”

The declaration leaves her fumbling for a response for a long beat, a bit flummoxed. 

He sees the window of opportunity, and takes advantage, stepping forward. “Peggy,” he says softly, firmly. “You gotta believe me.”

He could not have chosen more damning words. She stares up at him, vulnerability seeping in, and for a moment, just one, she entertains the possibility that he might be right. That there is a woman out there that doesn’t just share her face and mannerisms, but somehow _is_ her. They live in a world where a megalomaniacal red-skinned man can rip his own face off. She supposes there may be things far outside the normal convention of things that she could consider. 

When she admits that much to herself, she finds her damning verdict against Steve doesn’t stand as stalwartly as it did just a few minutes ago. She finds it crumpling against Steve’s convictions, a man she knows is more often right, true, and stubborn than any ten other men combined.

“So,” she offers, nonplussed, “if that's true, what does this all mean?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “Somehow, nothing good. I know she—you—that Peggy Carter out there saved Bucky’s life. That’s something you would do, but I also can’t imagine her landing that opportunity came without a cost.”

She can tell Steve feels like he’s calmed her down somewhat, confident enough to pull her into his arms. She goes willingly, although a bit stiffly at first, before finally relenting and relaxing into his embrace. 

“She had your shield, Steve,” Peggy says, shaking.

Steve’s face pinches with worry, and something else too, something she doesn’t recognize at first. “I know, Bucky told me.” 

His voice sounds warm, his embrace far too soft at the thought of someone else acquiring his most prized possession. She realizes what that other emotion is: pride. She supposes she should be flattered that he isn't offended at the thought of her taking over the shield, but Peggy doesn’t want to consider the possible scenarios that would lead to such a transfer of ownership.

“She also stole an important artifact,” Peggy tells him, looking up at him. From this close, she can see the beginnings of a stubble, a four o’clock shadow. “Substance X.”

She tells him about it, the special properties, the entire ordeal from Dr. Agoston’s acrobatic fall to Howard’s eventual discovery of the surveillance video tampering. Howard still hadn’t been able to recover the original video, but the footage of Dr. Agoston blowing up the lab has been proven counterfeit. 

There are too many pieces to the puzzle, and if Steve is right, some version of Peggy is somehow the mastermind behind it all. She can’t make sense out of the emerging picture.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “If what you’re saying is true, then I may have, perhaps, been overly harsh with you this last day.”

“At least this time you didn’t shoot me.”

“At you,” Peggy corrects. “I shot _at_ you. I knew Howard’s shield would hold up.”

He laughs a little, pulling her closer to him. “To be honest, I find your possessiveness a bit racy. I can't complain.”

She looks up at him, incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why do you think I never removed those bullet marks from my shield? I asked Howard to leave them there even with the new paint job.”

“You’re not serious,” she repeats, because she’s always found her streaks of jealousy entirely unbecoming. “You enjoyed me shooting you?”

“Shooting _at_ me,” he corrects, like he’s the one defending himself. “For the longest time, that was the only physical proof I had that you liked me. I had to keep what I could get. You left me in the cold for nearly a year afterwards.”

It seems like such a wasted opportunity now, lost because of her pride and stubbornness. Now that she has Steve, fully and so completely, she realizes how much of a shame it was that they lost so much time. 

She really shouldn’t waste any more of it.

“So, you like that I’m so possessive of you?” she asks him, voice dropping low.

Steve's eyes dilate, and she discovers that voice does things for him. “Yes, ma’am,” he offers.

She licks her lips, thinking of all the enticing ways this could play out. She already knows he’ll do whatever she asks, but it’s like she’s been given permission, the keys to a kingdom. “Tell me,” she says, curiously. “What would you do if I kissed someone else? Another Steve Rogers, even?”

His gaze darkens. “Probably would not have reacted well,” he admits, trying to maintain some control and dignity.

“Hmm,” she replies. She feigns ignorance. “What does that mean, exactly?”

He shakes his head, knows she’s baiting him, and can’t help but smile. She finds even his arrogant smirk devilishly handsome. “I’d have reacted worse than you, probably.”

“Probably?”

“Definitely,” he amends. “I _definitely_ would have gone storming through those woods, trying to find that smug sonofabitch to punch his lights out.”

“So, it would be fair to say,” she offers heavily, like she’s postulating some great theorem, “that you’re just as possessive of me as I am of you? That the idea of me kissing another man, even another Steve Rogers, would make you want to tear someone’s face off?” 

He doesn’t bother denying it. Only lets his dark hooded eyes betray the answer. She smiles, because Steve may have won the argument, but she feels like she’s proven her point just as well.

“I think you deserve a reprimand befitting the crime,” she tells him. “Take off your clothes. Fully, please.”

Steve swallows thickly, breath coming out heavy, and then he moves to obey, slowly at first, a bit self-consciously as if he had the slightest reason to be. He pulls his shirt over his head and then undoes his belt. Peggy holds herself apart, with difficulty, choosing instead to sit down on the nearby chair and enjoy the view. She’d asked this of him once before, in that shanty little inn in Poland. He’d obeyed then, too, although far more in a rush than this time. Unfortunately, they hadn’t managed the opportunity to do anything other than kissing in Poland.

“When do I get to see _you_?” Steve asks, almost wryly, like this is a hardship. But when he divests the last of his clothing, she can plainly see he's already hard.

“All good things,” Peggy promises, enjoying the sight of his toned chest and carved muscles. He is a sight worthy of admiration, lust and a thousand dirty fantasies – and he is all _hers_. Peggy rises to her feet.

“Sit,” she instructs, shoving him to the chair she just abandoned. 

She forces him down so quickly the chair almost upturns. Steve lets out a grunt of surprise and pleasure, and heat blooms throughout Peggy’s body as she straddles him. “Don’t move,” she tells him, then places kisses all over his neck, sucking at the place where his pulse beats, hands playing over his muscled abdomen. “Not one bit, not even if you feel like you’re going crazy.”

“Come on, Peg,” he groans, but obediently his fingers dig into the armrest so hard she can see his muscles straining. “This isn’t fair.”

“This isn’t meant to be fair, darling. Consider it punishment for kissing another woman, even another me. Now, stay still and don’t move.”

She spends a luxurious amount of time exploring his body, kissing and biting and teasing, pleased with herself every time she hears him suck in a harsh breath and exhale a groan. Every little sound he utters only encourages her more, but each touch is teasing, playful, until she thinks he’s had enough. Then, slowly, more slowly than Steve had managed the same task, Peggy lifts to her feet and starts to undress. She undoes the cinch on her bathrobe, letting the cumbersome thing fall away to the ground. Underneath, she’s wearing a soft pink nightgown, nothing particularly provocative, but the way Steve’s eyes roam over her, one would think it’s one of those skimpy lingerie items she sees in the corner sections of stores. 

Steve moves forward to close the space between them, but Peggy halts him with a hand. “Not yet,” she tells him. “What would you like me to do, Steve?” she asks. “Would you like me to take this off?”

He groans, closes his eyes, and admits in a strangled voice. “Yes, Jesus Christ, Peg. Yes.”

She smiles, pulling the straps off her shoulders and shimmying out of the gown. It drops to the floor, leaving her in her undergarments. If she had ever doubted Steve's desire for her before, the look in his eyes now slays any doubts. Before he can comment, Peggy drops to her knees before him, resuming her teasing caresses and kisses, giving him a nice view of her well-endowed chest as she moves up and down along his thighs. His hands stay helplessly at his sides, and she knows Steve is fighting every instinct in his body to reach for her, obeying her imposed rules to a 'T.' Finally, when she takes him into her mouth, Steve’s whole body tenses and both armrests snap off in his hands simultaneously. She thinks he’s going to come right then and there, without her giving him the permission, but she manages to sooth his arms back down at his sides with her hands, eyes twinkling as she looks up at him, swollen lips around his cock. Steve stills, forcing himself not to move, not to grab her hair as is often a guy’s go-to move in such scenarios. 

She sucks him off with a deliberate attempt to make it as intense as possible, working his shaft, full throating him as much as she can, which isn’t fully, because he’s so huge. Her eyes start to water a bit, after a while, and his hips are coming off the chair like he’s struggling against invisible restraints.

“Don’t come yet,” she warns him.

“Jesus, Peg,” he breathes, brokenly. “You’re fucking going to kill me.” 

“Where would be the fun in that?” 

She goes back down on him, and the benefits of the soulbond tell her every time he's dangerously close to finishing, as if his quick breathing and the tight expression on his face isn't enough of a signal. She brings him close to the edge once more, then backs off, making him curse her name in a harsh whisper, but then, finally, after a while, when the chair is about to fall apart under his restraint, him pleading with a groan, she looks up at him and says, “All right, my darling. You can come now.”

He comes all over her chest within seconds, groaning with release, full body sagging, collapsing back into the chair they will certainly have to throw out in the morning. Peggy feels pleased with herself, scooting up his slack body, grinning as Steve’s eyes flutter open. She knows he's touch sensitive, but Peggy really can’t help but kiss him all over his chest and neck, encouraging a second round before he’s had a chance to recover from the first. 

“Give me a sec, Peg,” he breathes out, heavily. “I can rally.”

“No rush,” she tells him, and she must sound too pleased with herself, because he cracks an eye open and decides enough is enough. He picks her up swiftly, eliciting a sharp squeak from her; she gathers that he’s probably done taking orders for the night. Not that she particularly minds. He carries her through the bedroom door to all but bodily throw her on the bed. He’s crawling up her body before she’s even managed to situate herself properly, and with hands balled around her undergarment, he rips them open by the seams. 

“That,” she tells him, crossly, “was completely unnecessary.”

That had been one of her favorite pairs.

He just smiles, smugly, and then buries his head between her legs, and Peggy loses all protests and all thoughts whatsoever. His mouth is a devious thing, licking and suckling at her, forcing Peggy into bucking wildly. She isn’t sure where he learned the behavior – hates to entertain the idea that he’d mastered this move on some other woman. She knows women used to throw themselves at him, left and right, at every available opportunity. USO girls, military, civilians, she doubts there was any shortage of volunteers. 

Something of the thought must bleed through their soulbond, because Steve lifts his head, and tells her, “Peg, stop. I can feel the jealousy radiating off of you. I’ve never done this with another person. Bucky just told me some pointers, that’s all. I’ve only ever been with you.”

“Oh,” she finds herself saying, and doesn’t know what to do with the information that Steve can dissect her emotions so thoroughly through their bond, so intensely, even while she’s working up an orgasm. “Okay,” she says, panting.

Steve goes back to work between her legs, making her come so hard she’s sure the neighbors will lodge noise complaints in the morning. Her body shakes, aftershocks working through her body, and Peggy comes down foggily, distantly blissed out and sweat-soaked. 

“Oh, do knock it off,” she finds herself saying, when she sees Steve grinning like the cat that ate the canary. 

“Can’t,” Steve replies. “I don’t think I’ll be able to stop smiling like this for _weeks_.”

Before she can even utter a noise of protest, he pulls her against him, mouth crashing onto hers as if the world doesn't exist. Somewhere, beyond them, she knows that they have a thousand and one pressing concerns, a war to fight, a doppelganger conspiracy to unfold, the fate of other people resting on their shoulders, but in that moment there is only her and Steve. He kisses her breathless, pressing against her enough that she can tell he’s fully ready for round two. 

“Already?” she groans. 

“Blame the serum,” he tells her. “Or the fact that you are the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen, and I could never get enough of you.”

“You already have me in bed, Steve. No need to over-exaggerate it with the flattery.”

“Who’s exaggerating?” Steve replies, as they tumble across the bed sheets.

#


	5. Chapter 5

#

“You ready for this, Peg?”

Peggy lets her gaze slip sideways to Steve, who stands near the exit of the diner. Lunch had been a nice reprieve, but now it’s once more into the fray, as the saying goes. Peggy leaves a large tip for the waitress, a sweet girl who’d been nothing but bashful smiles, and thanks the owner for their discretion. She quickly gathers her things, and Steve helps her into her coat. She presses her hat down so that it covers as much of her face as she can possibly manage, and then nods tightly at Steve. He swings the door open for her, and Peggy exits with Steve right behind her. Immediately, the barrage of flashing camera lights and the near assault of reporters hits her like a wave. 

_“Cap! Cap! Is this the lucky girl? Is she your soulbond?!”_

_“Is this Margaret Carter?!”_

_“Cap, whatdaya say to your adoring female fans now that you’re officially off the market?”_

_“Miss, can I get a picture? Look to the left!”_

They finally manage to make it to the car, barely. Peggy turns her head away as the flashes die down, Steve driving off fast enough that she can hear the tires squealing. Three days of this, and already she’s had enough. Some fool had leaked the news of their soulbond to the press, and the coverage had been front-page news on a smattering of papers the next morning – as if people didn’t have a war to worry about. 

They had to move out of their flat to a more secure facility across the city. Aside from the cosmetic inconveniences, Peggy knows there’s a whole host of other problems. The rest of her career, she fears, is going to be defined by this – Steve’s soulbond. One of the papers called her “ _Captain America’s War Bride_ ,” another newspaper referred to her as “ _the luckiest dame in the world.”_ Everyone from her childhood friends to her old math’s professor has been interviewed. 

The worst, however, was the frantic call she received from her mother in the dead of early morning, demanding to know why she found out about her only daughter’s life-altering bond from the local newspaper in Sheffield. She loves her mother, truly, dearly, but they’ve never seen eye-to-eye with each other, especially after Michael’s death. Peggy tries to ignore every last implied affront, maintaining a cool exterior, but the constant barrage of reporters is already wearing thin.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, for what feels like the dozenth time.

“This is hardly your fault, darling.”

“Yes, it is,” Steve replies. “I’m the one that filled out the papers in the hospital.”

“I was bleeding to death,” Peggy allots. “What’s done is done, Steve. This news was bound to get out at some point. I had hoped it would come later in our lives, preferably after the war, but there’s little controlling these things.”

His jawline sets at a cutting angle, staring out at the road impatiently. 

Peggy watches the scenery fly by. They have a meeting with Phillips in twenty minutes. He made sure to ask for Steve to be present, too. Butterfly’s storm her stomach. She’s been afforded a position of influence within SSR because of Philips’ discretion, but now, she fears he may be questioning the choice. Her budding career at espionage has likely taken a serious blow; she can’t imagine she’ll be able to continue many covert missions with her pictures splashed all across the papers. Maybe if she put on a wig, went as a blonde?

When they arrive at headquarters, predictably the low chatter all halts the minute they enter the bullpen. Peggy stops for a moment, despite herself, taking in the room. They’re all staring at her, men and women who she’s worked beside for years, people that have seen her wield a gun as much as the men next to her and usually with twice the precision. On the whole they’re good people, but gossip and headlines make fools of people. The men all stare at Steve with smirking appreciation, the women less charitably so at Peggy. 

Steve is at her elbow, but Peggy gently pulls her arm away; they needn’t help the vultures with visuals.

“You’re late,” Phillips says, when they enter his office.

“We’re ten minutes early,” Peggy counters.

Phillips drops his glasses onto the table. “I’ll cut right to it. Senator Brandt wants you,” he says to Peggy, “headlining on the USO tour.”

“You’re not serious!” Peggy fumes.

“They couldn’t get me,” Steve says, incredulous, “so they’re trying to take her?”

“I’m not even a bloody American!” Peggy scoffs, indignant.

“Well, you’re _Mrs. America_ now,” Phillips offers, eyes lifting towards Steve briefly before landing back on her. “Besides, you’re on loan from MI-5 to the Americans. Where you’re stationed, what your duties are – Uncle Sam decides that.”

“Sir—” Steve protests, but Peggy is already speaking over him. 

“You can’t let them do this.” Peggy marches forward, angry. “I will not be some girl they throw in front of the crowds for bond revenues and cheap laughs.”

Phillips looks tired. “One of the few ways I was able to keep you on board was because nobody knew who you were or gave a damn where you were stationed. Now, if you’re injured in the field, we’re dealing with a PR nightmare. No one wants to see women dying on the frontline, splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the Allied world. It would be devastating for morale.”

“Losing a war will be far worse for morale,” Steve counters. “Sir, she’s a better asset to you in the field, and you know it. Tell Senator Brandt he can shove this USO idea straight up his keister—”

“You already did that, Captain,” Phillips replies. “You got away with it. Unfortunately, she can’t.”

“Why?” Peggy demands, coldly. “Because I’m a woman?”

Phillips sighs, taking a moment to collect himself. “You’ve become an international symbol overnight, whether any of us likes it or not.” He slams a file down on the table in frustration, the first real sign that he’s as unhappy about the development as any of them. “My hands are tied, Carter. I tried to stop it, but it’s above my head. The best I can do is buy you some time. A week, two tops. After that, I have direct orders to ship you to the States. It’s a damn shame and a waste of good resources. You were a fine agent, Carter. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

“Thank you, sir,” Peggy replies, tartly. “But you’ll find I’m not quite finished yet.”

She turns to leave without waiting for a response.

#

Steve follows hot on her heels, but she needs a moment to herself. Pressing a hand to his arm when he catches up to her, he stills for a moment, and instinctually, without saying a word, nods and steps back. For whatever else the world has managed wrong about her, she may in fact be the luckiest dame in the world to have found a man like Steve. She’s thankful he knows when to respect her space.

A while later finds her at the back alley of the building, quietly slipping free. The alleyway is blissfully free of reporters and noisy co-workers alike, although she knows the respite will be brief. Peggy takes the opportunity to tie her scarf more securely around her face, covering up her hair, before she slips on a pair of wide sunglasses. Behind her, the sound of something small and metal, likely a can, clanks down the street. She pauses, peering into the street beyond, knowing dressed as she is the disguise will not hold up under intense scrutiny.

What she isn’t expecting is for Chimera, the HYDRA agent, to step out from behind an empty dumpster. Two other armed men join him, and Peggy finds herself outnumbered.

“You’re coming with us,” the man codenamed Chimera says. “Don’t scream. I’m not in the mood for hysterics.”

“Right, then,” Peggy says, deciding she’ll attack him first. “No hysterics, I promise.”

Chimera walks up to her with handcuffs brandished, while the other two hold her at gunpoint. Peggy waits until he’s near enough before quickly slamming a knee into his gut and then flinging him back so forcefully, he goes careening into the pair behind him. It isn’t that Peggy hasn’t done the move before, but the lengths he flew and the strength that she tossed him back catches even Peggy by surprise.

The men regroup, firing off at her, and Peggy rolls over, dodging bullets, popping back up on her feet with a garbage bin lid in her hands, using it as cover as they fire at her. 

“We need her alive!” Chimera shouts at his men.

The bullets stop, and one of his men pulls out a lengthy rod against her, advancing. Peggy has a gun in her purse but decides she doesn’t need it. She ducks under a wild swing, grabs his arm, twists at the wrist, and then hurls the rod back towards him. She slams the flat-heel of her palm up against his nose, and he goes down. Another man advances to take his place, but Peggy dispatches him just as easily, sweeping his legs out from under him and finishing him off with one solid punch to the face. 

There’s a “pop” and a flash of a camera going off while Peg is mid-punch. She whirls to find the press have found her again, coming down the alley way, heedless of the presence of danger in their eagerness to snap a picture of her.

When she turns back, Chimera is backing away from the cameras, retreating towards the other end of the street. She can’t let him get away. Giving chase, she follows the man down the road, rushing into oncoming traffic and then past it, the flashes of cameras dying behind her as she puts distance from the reporters. 

When she arrives at the end of the block, she sees Chimera disappear around a brick building. Peggy reaches into her handbag, pulling out the small weapon she stashed there. She peeks, gingerly, around the brick building.

“I suggest you turn around carefully,” she orders, leveling her gun at his back; Chimera freezes. “Or I can assure you that you’ll be having a far worse day than the horrible one I’m having.”

Before he can straighten to turn to her, Steve’s shield comes flying out of nowhere, knocking the man unconscious; a previously unseen gun drops from his hand to the ground. The shield hits the brick wall and ricochets back, returning to its owner. Peggy follows the trajectory, already poised to tell Steve she had the situation perfectly under control, when a dark figure hidden in the shadows catches Steve’s shield. Instantly, Peggy knows the silhouette is wrong.

“I know everything was perfectly under control,” a familiar voice says, crisp and sharp. “But a helping hand couldn’t hurt.”

The person steps out of the shadows, revealing Peggy’s double, a match, from the victory rolls down to her shoulders, to the familiar shade of brown eyes – with one major key difference. She wears a uniform remarkably similar to Steve’s _Captain America_ uniform, in shades of red, white and blue emblazoned on the chest. 

Peggy quickly raises her gun again. “Who are you?”

“I would think that would be plainly obvious.”

Perhaps Peggy could have tolerated the cheeky response better had she been in a better mood. “Answer the question, or I just shoot.”

“You won’t do that,” her double challenges, “the same way I know you won’t bring me in to the SRR until you understand more about the situation. You need answers. You won’t stop until you get them. Alas, my own tenacity works against me in this scenario, so I’m here to cut through all the mire and bog. I believe it’s high time you and I had a chat, don’t you?”

Peggy can hear the nearby traffic and the shouts of reporters nearby. One of the few things keeping Peggy from reacting with her basic instincts, she can admit, is Steve’s voice in her head, pleading for her to listen. _Somehow, someway, that woman is you._

“Not here,” Peggy finally determines. “Bring the man along. We’ll find a more suitable place.” 

The double nods, unmindful of the gun leveled her way, and walks over to pick up Chimera as if he weighed nothing more than a sack of potatoes.

#

Her double deposits Chimera into a heap on the factory floor, using some nearby rope to tie him to a pillar. They've already removed the cyanide pill hidden underneath a false tooth, a signature Hydra move. The dilapidated building isn’t much to look at; a few wooden crates lay stacked to one end and the otherwise vacant area is coated with a thick film of dust. It’s obvious no one has been in the factory for some time. They walk into the nearby office, far enough away from Chimera that he won’t be able to listen in on their conversation should he reawaken at any time.

As they stand there facing each other, the tension is obvious, and not simply because Peggy has a gun trained on her. It’s outlandish to be staring at an exact replica of herself; Peggy has only ever caught her reflection in mirrors, in pictures and reels, but to face a living, breathing duplicate is like staring at a dream. Peggy isn’t sure what to focus on.

“You’re standing here with my face, my body, and Steve’s shield,” Peggy says. It’s the same shield, she can tell. It has the same bullet markings as his, the ones Peggy herself had put there. “Start explaining.”

“We must be quick,” her double says. “If I recall correctly, the last time this happened with Chimera, Steve was beside himself with worry. He’ll be searching for you.”

“You knew he was going to attack? How do I know you’re not with them?”

“With HYDRA? I’m coming here out of my own volition,” her double says. “I hope that garners some confidence.”

“I have you at gunpoint.”

“You and I both know that hardly means a thing.”

Peggy assesses the other woman. She carries herself with the same confidence that Peggy does, but there is something different too, harder, more toned, more trained in her movements. The way she handled Steve’s shield had also lent her an air of poise. Yes, there is little doubt; the gun isn’t a motivating factor in the conversation, but Peggy refuses to let her guard down.

“In recent days,” Peggy recounts, helpfully, “you’ve impersonated me on several occasions, including to steal a priceless, powerful artifact and to kiss a man everyone now knows is my soulbond. I’ll be the judge of how much confidence you inspire.”

“Yes, I suppose an apology is in order for that kiss, but you’ll forgive me if I can’t muster remorse for kissing a man that I have loved the majority of my very long life. I don’t believe you’ll respond well to disingenuous remorse, as I do not and will not ever regret kissing Steve Rogers.”

Well, this is off to a great start.

Incredulous and cross, Peggy warns, “Steve is the only reason I am entertaining even listening to you right now. Don’t test my patience. It’s already wearing thin. Start explaining.”

“It isn’t going to be easy to explain. There’s a great deal, all of it on the edge of impossibility. I only ask that you reserve your judgement until I’ve had a chance to explain what I can. I am you, Peggy, from the future.”

Several conflicting thoughts coalesce in a second, and Peggy lands on, “Bullocks,”

“When you were seven years old,” her double offers, wearily, “you broke your arm climbing a tree in the neighbor’s backyard. You told our mother it was because you had to prove to Michael you could climb the tree just as well as him. That wasn’t the truth. The truth was, you had seen a baby bird on the ground, one which had fallen from its nest. You were trying to put it back – and fell. The baby bird died. It was, until much later in your life when the war began, of the greatest shames of your life.”

Peggy feels the air go out of her lungs, uncomprehending. She’s never told anyone that story, not a whisper of it. Her mother had mistaken all the crying because of the broken arm, but Peggy had been distraught over the bird’s demise. She can still remember cradling the broken thing in her hand.

How on Earth—

“I am you,” her double repeats. “I have lived your life, and then some. Unfortunately, aside from the details necessary for you to know, I can’t tell you much of anything to preserve the timeline.”

“Timeline?” Peggy repeats.

Her double sighs, gathering herself, taking a moment to put her thoughts in order as if she were about to declare something more outrageous than being a time-traveler.

“I am,” her double begins, “from the year 2023.”

“Oh, now you’re just having me on! That would make you older than my grandmother, god rest her soul.” 

Her face is more toned, a sharper angular cut to her jawline, things that leave a slight impression, adding a few years to her face. Small differences, barely imperceptible. Certainly nothing that could add nearly a century.

“In truth, I’m only a few years older than you,” her double goes on to say. “But very shortly, there’s going to be an event in your life, a cataclysmic event that will launch you into the future, nearly seventy years into the future. And I need your help to obtain something of great importance before that happens.”

“What on earth on you blabbering about?”

“I’m sorry, Peggy. You have no idea how truly sorry I am. But I’m doing you the curtesy of being blunt and honest. You’re going to be ripped from your time here with Steve very shortly, and I’m who you become.”

Before Peggy can respond to the outrageous declaration, a spark of electricity courses through her doubles’ body, causing her to fold in half and cry out. The electricity seems to be generated from her own clothing, a fissure of small blue lightning that works its way up and through her body. For a moment, her double’s disconcerting Captain America uniform vanishes, as if it were nothing more than a mirage, revealing some sort of off-white synthetic uniform underneath with contrasting red gloves.

Peggy instinctively steps forward but is unsure how to help, staring helplessly as the woman suffers convulsions. Eventually, though, the electricity subsides and her double recovers with a groan. 

“My quantum suit,” her double manages, “has been malfunctioning for some time. Which is why I’m here, risking bloody time anomalies and the threads of my own history. I’m dying in this suit, Peggy, but I can’t risk taking it off again for fear it won’t work once I do. I need to retrieve the Tesseract and return to my time. And I need your help to do that.”

The Tesseract. The blue cube in Schmidt’s possession. 

“Why?” Peggy demands.

“To save half of all creation.”

#

His name is Thanos.

He sounds as if he is worse than a thousand Hitlers or Schmidts combined, worse than anyone else that Peggy could possibly fathom. He is, if she is to believe her double, what inspires a team from the future, a team her double only vaguely refers to as the Avengers, to create a time-traveling device, connected through her suit, to fix Thanos’ atrocities. Wiping out half of all life in the universe.

But if her double’s team can retrieve the six Infinity Stones, the ones that predate the universe and possess unlimited energy, they may be able to fix everything. The Tesseract is one, a powerful item currently in Red Skull’s possession. Her double already retrieved one of the other stones, the one she refers to as the Reality Stone; Peggy has only known it as Substance X. All six stones are needed to undo Thanos’ doing. 

The story sounds as outlandish as some great science fiction novel, but Peggy isn’t laughing. 

“I need the Tesseract,” her double says, near pleading. “And I’m not in the condition anymore to retrieve it. My suit took damage mid-travel, and I ended up in this timeline weeks earlier than expected. I’ve been biding my time, but impatience got the best of me. I’ve made errors – other times, outright decisions – that have changed the timeline.”

“Being spotted by any number of people, you mean,” Peggy offers. “Like Steve. That was sloppy.”

“Actually, I was referring to saving Sergeant Barnes’ life,” her double offers wryly, but she shortly grimaces, still winded from her ordeal with the malfunctioning suit. “But I can see we’re still not passed the whole kissing incident.”

Peggy wants to feel angry, or incredulous, or even just plain skeptical. She feels all three of those things, but so much more as well. The story she’s been told is so outrageous she can’t help but think if anyone were to concoct a story, it would be more believable than this. Still, even, the suit’s technology is leaps and bounds beyond anything she can fathom, even from a genius like Howard. And there is Steve’s insistence, too, that her double is ‘the real thing,’ a version of Peggy. 

Her gut wars with her rationality, trying to decide if she can remotely trust this woman. 

It’s too much, though, to ask on faith alone.

“You expect me to believe all of this?” Peggy says, disquieted. “I still have no reason to trust you.”

“You don’t _want_ to believe me,” her double corrects. “And I can hardly blame you. I wouldn’t want to believe it either, not if it meant losing Steve.”

Peggy feels her throat close off, turning away so that the other woman won’t see the emotions surge unbidden to her eyes. If she is to believe the story, then all of it, this entire mess, begins two weeks from now in Red Skull’s base. Peggy will ultimately help Steve win the battle and defeat HYDRA, but in doing so will crash a ship into the Arctic during her final moments. She will then spend sixty-six years unconscious and frozen in ice under a state of suspended animation, something she doubts she would have survived without her soulbond to Steve. 

When she awakens, it’ll be in the early 21st century.

Without Steve.

“This all has to happen,” her double says, painfully. “For us to get the chance to fight Thanos in the future, to come up with this plan, for me to go back and retrieve two of the six stones. I’m sorry, Peggy. I wish there were some other way. But I can’t fight anymore, I can barely move. I won’t be able to retrieve the Tesseract without your help, and you deserve to know the truth, horrible as it is. I would want to know the truth—”

“Why?” Peggy asks. “Why me? Why not Steve, or anyone else? Or why not keep your secrets and timeline intact, and try—”

“I’ve thought about this a thousand different ways. Thought about forging ahead without your help, or anyone else’s. But it’s too great a risk. None of the others will ever have their hands on the cube, except you. Right before the Valkyrie ship goes down, you’ll have possession of the Tesseract. I need you to give it to me because I’m incapable of getting it myself.”

But all Peggy can focus on is the potential loss ahead of her, one too great a void to imagine. Losing Steve, after only just gaining him, soulbond and all, is a fate worse than death. And she’s supposed to face a brave new world afterwards, a world borne of more death and destruction than she can imagine, far worse than the current world war that plagues all of Earth. 

“You expect too much,” Peggy says, incredulous. 

Her double pauses, admitting painfully, “Yes, but it’s no less than what’s necessary.”

“Square this in your head,” Peggy challenges, harshly. “I am not going to leave Steve!”

“I know the sacrifices I’ve made,” her double says, barely a whisper, eyes shimmering with unfallen tears. “I shouldn’t ask anyone else to give the same, but the lives of too many people depend on it. If there was anything less at stake, I wouldn’t be here putting this burden on you.” 

A current of horror runs through Peggy, forcing her to close her eyes, steeling herself against it and the overwrought emotions that come with it. Her hands tremble with the effort. 

“What happens to Steve?”

Her double looks away. “I can’t trust you with that information.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake—”

“I’ve already saved Bucky’s life,” her double cuts in, “in some attempt to mitigate the loss he’s about to suffer. You and I are not objective when it comes to him and preserving the timeline. You can’t do anything about the way his life lands, Peggy, other than to make the most of the time you have left with him. Trust me, these next two weeks are more precious than you can imagine. They sustain Steve for a lifetime.”

The light hanging overhead casts shadows over the crisp lines of her double’s face. Despite herself, Peggy acknowledges the plaguing horror that this woman may be telling the truth. She has been studiously scrutinizing the other woman, trying to find flaws, defects in her mannerisms. But she is Peggy Carter, still stiff-lipped and stubborn in all the ways that Peggy can recognize in herself, but she is harsher, too, pared down and more ruthless in her calculations. There are sketches of wisdom in her eyes that Peggy doesn’t see in her mirror, faint indentations of knowledge that have settled heavily. 

Perhaps the other woman can read Peggy’s scrutiny because she looks away quietly. “Tomorrow,” her double returns, all business again, “a London newspaper will headline a picture of you clocking that HYRDA agent’s lights out, and they’ll call you _Captain Britain_ for it.”

“Captain Britain?” Peggy repeats, incredulous, as if _that_ were the most outrageous thing.

“Ten days after that,” the other Peggy continues, “Phillips will lead a briefing based on Zola’s intelligence. _‘Schmidt’s working with powers beyond our capabilities. If he gets across the Atlantic, he will wipe out the entire Eastern seaboard in an hour._ ’ Those will be Howard’s exact words. Steve will make a plan to invade the base head-on. That’s when you’ll know it’s time. That’s when you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”

For once in her life, Peggy is at a loss for words. 

Her double rises slowly, painfully, to her feet. “You’ll need to communicate with me when the time comes. An earpiece.” She deposits something small and circular into Peggy’s hands, a completely foreign object that Peggy realizes must fit into her ear. “I’m truly sorry, Peggy. I wish there was some other way. You have no idea how much.” 

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Peggy returns.

“You don’t have to,” her double replies. “I know myself well enough to know you’ll do it. As the saying goes – _above all else,_ _duty first_. But I warn you of your biggest weakness. Steve can’t know any of this. He’ll try to protect you – save you. And the universe can’t afford that.”

#

On the march back to the SSR headquarters, Peggy goes through several rounds of denial alongside a heaping manifesto regarding King and country, the safeguard of her world and her people, and even the legacy of her fallen brother. Her thoughts circle darkly, limping out like a wounded and bleeding animal, the baser survival instincts rearing their head. Heaven help her, but she needs Steve like she needs her next breath, and all the reminders of obligations flounder under the burden of knowing she may one day soon never hold Steve in her arms again. 

Except… Peggy has always put her responsibilities ahead of her own emotions and desires, even her own welfare. 

Escorting Chimera into the underground bunker heralds more scrutiny than she entertained just that morning, not quite the same judgment or amusement, but Peggy hardly notices. Reports clearly already came in of her attack, and though people make a hole for Peggy and her prisoner through the halls, Peggy doesn’t care about the attention one bit. She drops Chimera off with a guard with strict orders to keep him watched and isolated. 

She takes the lift down a few floors, her mind only focused on one thing – finding Steve. It’s as if he’s a beacon, something only she can feel through her bond the closer she gets to him, drawing her to him blindly. The anxiety and concern stemming from the bond tells Peggy that he’s been worried sick, but when the lift doors ping open, her heart stops in her throat as she finds him unexpectedly standing on the other side of the doors, in a vacant hallway as if he was waiting for her. 

There’s a beat of stillness where his jawline collapses, his startling blue-gray eyes closing in relief. The charge in the air between them is familiar now but no less overwhelming for it. He opens his arms and without a word exchanged, she moves into his outstretched embrace in the empty hallway, warmth radiating off him like a furnace. She slides her hands up his arms to rest on his shoulders, strong and solid beneath her palms. She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, just soaking up the feeling he inspires by his mere presence, a feeling of shelter and safety. 

“Peg,” he breathes. “Where’ve you been? I thought—”

“I know, I know,” she cuts him off, pulling back.

“What happened?” he asks. “Was it HYDRA?”

If that were her only problem.

The lift doors open again, a trooper stepping foot off; simultaneously, Peggy and Steve pull apart. The trooper isn’t really paying attention, offering a distracted nod, head buried in paperwork as he moves down the corridor.

In unspoken unison, Peggy and Steve both decide privacy is of paramount importance for what’s about to happen next. They step inside the vacated lift, and the doors are hardly closed shut before they’re blindly reaching for each other again, this time in a fevered rush, cutting the distance in a blink. Steve edges her against the wall, mouth closing in over hers, desperation and recklessness making them a breathing pair of fools. It’s like a switch has been flipped and even if every rational thought about professionalism and decorum Peggy ever entertained came bearing down on her in that single instant, she’d be powerless to stop herself.

She manages to blindly stab at the stop button, preventing the lift from opening to a floor full of gawkers, but that’s about all for shows of conservancy. 

In between kisses, she tells him she’s fine, that she managed to come out of the fight with barely a scratch, but Steve seems far more interested in checking her thoroughly himself, placing kisses at the shell of her ear, down her neck, his touch scorching, spreading heat and a shot of lust through her.

But as intoxicating as it is, her doubles’ voice worms into her head. _Make the most of the time you have left with him. Trust me, these next two weeks are more precious than you can imagine._ In her love-stricken naivety Peggy never imagined a world without Steve, the assurance that he’d always be there for her an unthinking assumption, an impossible assumption especially given the war.

In the midst of a barrage of kisses, Steve suddenly comes to a halt, hands stilling on her hips. “What’s wrong? Are you–you’re _shaking_.”

Peggy feels her heart seize in her chest. “I’m just… my darling, I’m just really glad we’re both here,” she says softly.

“I’ll always be here for you,” he promises. “You know that.”

It’s the worst thing he could have said to her, given everything. Suddenly wrong-footed, guilt churning in her stomach, she pulls away because she can’t conjure up a response. She can’t find it in her to lie in that moment, but she can’t tell him the truth either. She manages to collect herself, fixing her disheveled clothes into something resembling order, and hits the release button on the lift. 

“We’ll continue this later,” she promises him, fixing his tie. “Right now, I have to give Phillips a debrief on Chimera.”

#

But by the time Peggy and Steve make it back, Chimera is already dead. 

“Apparently, he requested to use the restroom facilities,” Phillips informs them, sourly, “and the ham-fisted guard thought it was a good idea. Chimera broke a piece of the mirror and sliced his own throat open. Damn shame. We could have used the intel. Did he tell you anything when you captured him?”

“Not much,” Peggy answers. “He was unconscious for most of the time I had him.”

“You were gone for nearly two hours,” Steve points out. 

“Yes, well,” Peggy manages, quick on her toes. “I had to avoid the ghastly press. I stayed hidden in a factory to avoid anymore unsightly pictures. As it is, I’m sure those devils managed to snap something horrid that will be in the papers by tomorrow.”

It isn’t a complete lie, which Peggy knows from experience is the best sort of lie. She keeps her eyes focused ahead, hands carefully crossed over her chest, steeling herself against Steve’s scrutiny; she can feel his eyes squarely on her rather than on the dead man sprawled out across the floor, blood pooled all around him like a halo. She can’t imagine what he’s reading off their soulbond, and Peggy is trying to control the flood of emotions, locking down the fear and alarm. She can’t quite be managing it, judging by Steve’s grim-set face, almost carved from stone. 

“Captain,” she overhears Phillips say, clearing his throat. He discreetly motions to his lips. “You got a little something there, son.”

Steve straightens, rubbing at his mouth where he wipes away a trace of her lipstick. As mortification licks up Peggy’s spine, she realizes compartmentalizing their attraction is proving as difficult a task as their worst critics would have people believe. The entire thing is unbecoming, especially in front of her superior, but Phillips just looks entertained.

He ends the impromptu meeting shortly thereafter, slating Steve’s entire team to take the week off, possibly longer. Although not explicitly stated, it’s obvious Peggy is under temporary house arrest, and Captain America himself under orders to protect her. She’d be insulted, but the truth is, if she is to believe her double, she can’t argue with Phillips’ orders given the timetable she’s already working with.

And therein lies the rub, because Peggy has to fight her instincts, because she finds herself believing the impossible story. Even if she doesn’t _want_ to.

Peggy tries to act natural, as if it is just another day of their normal life-and-death close calls, but she catches smoldering looks from Steve across the room, and not the kind that usually make her weak in the knees. He must sense something is off. Peggy can feel the change in him over the course of the day, but if she runs through her choices, they are all abysmal. She knows if she told Steve the truth, he’d fight with every ounce of his considerable strength to change the future, and if her double was telling the truth, too much rested at stake. Too many lives. On the other hand, if her double was lying, she can use Steve’s help and considerable skills. Ultimately, she decides the wait-and-see method as the tried and true course of action. She'll see if the predictions her double made will prove false. If Peggy can prove that, then telling Steve will become her obvious strategy. She can mitigate any fallout in the meantime.

She just hopes it’s all a lie.

#

The next few days are… not ideal.

Sure enough, as her double predicted, a London paper hails her as _Captain Britain_ the day after the Chimera attack, with a picture above the fold of Peggy smashing a HYDRA agent’s face in with a solid punch _._ It not only stings her pride but serves as proof against the theory her double was telling lies. The moniker sticks, despite Peggy’s explicit threats against anyone within earshot. _Captain Britain_ is utilized with some frequency over the next few days, some in jest, full tongue-in-cheek, others – mainly the Howlies – in complete earnestness.

Work proves a poor distraction. She gets into the bunker and all she can think about is Steve. She finds herself dancing on a taut rope, snapping at real and imagined offenses all around her. Every time she’s alone with Steve, there is a tension in the air. She wants to strangle her doppelganger and her stupid words. _Enjoy the time remaining_? Bloody Nora! How on earth is she supposed to manage that with everything hanging over her? For all of her attempts at seeming normal, Steve sees right through it. He’s asked a dozen and one times what’s bothering her, and each time Peggy comes up with a way around the truth. The HYDRA plot to take her. Her “mysterious” doppelganger. The impending debacle of the USO tours. The war. Red Skull. They do not have a shortage of uncertainties and concerns.

Peggy finds she can’t sleep. Despite the coldness of the winter, Peggy feels like she’s burning up at night, sweat breaking out all over her skin, her mind trapped in a loop of the same thoughts over and over again. And deep inside, she can feel Steve’s frustration too, his worry, the ache of a clenched jaw not her own, the tension resilient in his body. The only time they're on the same page, banishing the strain between them, is when they're lost between sheets in the bedroom, utilizing her insomnia for purposes better suited than frustrating worries. Peggy abandons herself there, or perhaps it's more accurate to say she takes refuge there, holding Steve so tightly that it borders on possessive. And perhaps in response to her, Steve becomes equally as demanding of her, his body constantly chasing hers, always reaching to close any gap. When they're not in public, they can't keep their hands off each other.

But when they're not making love, her words fail Peggy – and it used to be the easiest thing in the world, to talk to him. There is a chasm between them, ever growing, and she doesn't know how to mend it. 

“Someone die?” Bucky grunts, ever so charmingly, when they visit him at the hospital. 

The downtime has afforded a number of the Howlies an opportunity to recoup, and none need it more than Bucky. He’s likely going to be discharged back to the States, but no one has had the heart to tell him so, least of all Steve. She doubts Bucky’s unaware of the pending dismissal, and imagines he finds it as charming as her pending orders to headline the USO tours.

“What’s the matter with you two?” Bucky asks, looking at the wide berth between Steve and Peggy. They’re standing at opposite ends of the room. “Normally you’re joined at the hip.”

“Nothing's wrong.” Steve tries to sell it with a roll of his eyes. “It’s called maintaining a professional distance in public, Buck.”

Bucky snorts. “See, you should never get into espionage, Steve, because your face. It’s _bad_.” 

Peggy decides a change of subject is in order and spots a large stack of books. “Well, this is surprising.” She picks up a heavy tome. “ _Ulysses?”_

“Steve brought them over,” Bucky replies, wryly, “since I’ve got so much free time on my hand now.” 

“I would have much preferred the mysteries of Agatha Christie,” Peggy replies, ignoring his prickly attempt at self-deprecation. “But I suppose this has its charms.”

“See?” Bucky says to Steve, pointing a thumb at her. “Captain Britain knows proper entertainment.”

“Don’t you start with that!” she warns.

Bucky keeps smirking. “From what I hear, that publicity might keep you in England rather than on the USO tours.”

“Yes, well,” she replies, unhappily. “Undiluted patriotism has certain benefits, but I was never going to go on the USO tours under any circumstances, so it hardly matters.”

“Atta girl,” Bucky approves. 

“So,” Steve says, eying the byplay between his girl and his best friend like he doesn’t quite know what to do with their newfound rapport. He doesn’t look jealous. Just adorably confused. “You read any of the book?”

“Not really,” Bucky replies. “Keep on getting headaches. When it’s not that, it’s body aches. When it’s not that, it’s phantom aches in places I don’t even have a body part anymore. So, not really a great time to be reading.”

“You managing to eat, at least?” Peggy asks, hoping to rally him before it turns into another spiraling diatribe. Bucky has his good days and bad. She isn’t sure what day this is. “I’m sure we can get you something better to eat than the hospital food.”

“Don’t bother,” Bucky replies, lightly. “If I’m not hungry, I’m angry, or generally a foul-mouthed lug, I think a nurse called me. If I had a week, I still couldn’t list all the reasons why I’m feeling this way.”

Steve looks a little lost and forlorn. “Kinda obvious, Buck, don’t you think?”

Bucky only replies, “Condescension is already on the list, thanks.” 

Steve sighs, pulling back from the conversation a little. He goes up to the book to skim through a few pages, and she watches him move around in a distracted state, his normally efficient stride a little rough around the edges. Bucky glances from Steve to Peggy, shaking his head a little, an action that Steve misses entirely with his back to him. Peggy, on the other hand, meets his hypercritical stare head on. 

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky says, rousing him from the book. “I change my mind. You mind seeing if I can get something decent to eat from the café down the block? The food here is practically a war crime.”

Steve snaps the book binding closed. “What do you want?”

“Bacon.” Bucky says, emphatically. “I’d _kill_ for a good piece of bacon.”

“You got it,” Steve assures, to the tall order. 

As he leaves through the door, a jumble of voices and murmurs drift in from the hallway, and in the far distance, a patient is screaming like he’s being sawed in half. Peggy finds it disturbing, but Bucky barely pays it any heed. At this point he must be so used to soldiers and their pained cries that he tends to ignore it. 

Bucky turns his attention to Peggy. “For a pair literally made for each other, you do make a lot of work outta being together.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Peggy says.

“Don’t you?” Bucky replies. “Steve’s as miserable as me, and that just makes no damn sense. Not when he finally has you. Unless, of course, his misery has something to do _with_ you.” 

“Yes, well, we live complicated lives. Surely you didn’t think having a soulbond during a war was all fairytales and rainbows.”

“Wouldn’t disagree with that, but sometimes smart people need their heads knocked together more than the dumb ones.”

“How eloquent. You should start writing a book of poetry.”

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll get right on that after I finish _Ulysses.”_

Peggy braces herself for the questions headed her way, filled with obvious inquiries and Bucky’s patented innuendos. She has all the answers freshly poised on her lips, easy half-lies sprinkled with enough truths to convince nearly anybody. 

What she isn’t expecting is for Bucky to go the window, staring out at the skyline of the city in silence. They’ve never suffered the luxury of silent moments well before; neither Peggy nor Bucky are to the type to stew in each other presence without some sort of quick rejoinder or sarcastic comment. Still, there’s a weight hanging in the air that makes Peggy hesitant to break it. 

Eventually, Bucky says, “I had a dream. Another one.” 

Peggy stills. She’s spent enough nights waking to his terrified screaming to know which dreams he is talking about. For all too brief a moment, Peggy entertains the fantasy of subjecting Zola to all the same tests and horrid experimentations he had performed on Bucky, especially the ones that had left scars. The man is cooperating with SSR now, ensuring an all too cozy accommodation in comparison to what he deserves – a barren cell with a key tossed away. It isn’t fair. 

“I don’t know what I did to deserve the second chance Steve gave me,” Bucky continues, “or even the third chance your lookalike did. I just know one thing. There are a handful of people I trust with my life, and fewer even that I trust with Steve’s. Don’t make me start regretting your prime position on the list, Peg. He knows you’re keeping secrets.”

She could deny it, of course, but for some reason she doesn’t bother. “He’s discussed this with you?” she questions, faintly.

Bucky only offers a flat look.

Peggy takes a breath and studies Bucky’s profile, his normal well-shaven face marred by the beginnings of an untidy beard. He is so much older than he used to be, not just in years, but in experience, too. He’s changed so much since that first day she’d met him, but they have all changed, haven’t they? In her former life, she would have never trusted Bucky Barnes with her secrets, and even nowadays when Peggy is arguably more guarded, more secretive. 

Yet, here they are – and Peggy finds her stalwart defenses crumbling a little. 

“Can I trust in your confidence and discretion?” she asks. “And that whatever I say to you today stays between us, and no one else, especially not Steve?”

Bucky hesitates, a darkening expression on his face, before he reluctantly nods. “Yeah. Consider me a vault.”

“You’re right,” she confesses. “He’s right. I’m keeping secrets.”

“What secrets?”

“I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell anyone, not even Steve, and that’s entirely the point. It isn’t a matter of trust. It isn’t even a matter of desire. If I had a say in how any of this was going down, I wouldn’t be doing any of it. But I don’t. I have what I have.”

“Which is your way of saying what?”

“I don’t have much of a choice, Bucky. At least, not yet. Have you never kept a secret from Steve, one even done with his best interest at heart?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything at first, but she can see the answer written plainly on his face. 

“Then you understand that sometimes, while Steve is so busy protecting everyone else, someone has to protect _him_. If I don’t keep my secrets, I fear he might do something rash, something that will only spell doom and jeopardize a lot of people.”

“Jesus, Peg, how bad of a shithole did you find yourself in?”

She pauses. “Can I ask you for a favor?”

“Depends on the favor,” Bucky answers.

“Promise me,” Peggy says, “if anything ever happens to me, you’ll be there to pull him back from the edge. You won’t let it eat away at him.”

Panic courses through Bucky’s face. “Peg, what’s going on?” he demands.

“Promise me, Bucky,” Peggy forces her voice even, stern. “You’ll pull him back.”

Bucky looks incredulous. “You die, Peg, and that’ll be it for him. You know that. He’ll spend the rest of his life haunted by the memory of you. He’ll be staring at that pocket compass of his until he’s old and wrinkly. You know that.”

“You make sure that doesn’t happen. You make sure he survives. Not only that, he _lives._ I don’t want him haunted by me.”

“You don’t get a say in some things,” Bucky answers. “Especially if you’re not around to say ‘em.”

“Bucky, please,” Peggy strangles out. “I need you to promise me. I need to know he’ll be all right.”

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. After a moment, he finally concedes her request with quiet nod, and silence unspools out between them.

“Good,” Peggy finally manages, fighting back tears. She clears her throat. “Good.”

#

The towel is just out of reach. Peggy sighs, cursing to herself a little as she climbs out of the tub, the water nearly sloshing over the lip. She leaves wet footprints on the tile as she traipses across the cold floor and grabs the towel, eagerly wrapping it around herself. The reflection in the mirror shows hair clinging to her face in wet curls, her skin pink and freshly scrubbed. She looks, even to herself, rather young and despondent. Eyes puffy, cheeks gaunt, general appearance altogether glum. 

Steve will be home soon, and this distraught appearance simply won’t do. 

Especially since Peggy has decided that she’s going to seduce Steve tonight. 

Not physically, at least not exclusively. That is an easy enough feat when a mere hand brush can get both of them distracted like bumbling teenagers. No, she needs to charm him into comfort, the old rhythm of trust and relaxation. There has been altogether too much tension between them lately, and Peggy plans on disabusing Steve of any notions that something is wrong. A difficult task given the soulbond, but Peggy believes she can be equal to the task. It’s a painful necessity.

Besides, she doesn’t want her last few days with him to play out like some heart wrenching drama. She has the rest of her life, possibly, to grieve for his loss. She’ll be damned is she starts while he’s still within arm’s reach. 

She sets out to make herself up like she’s preparing for battle. First, she sections off and builds her hair in rolls, pinning everything in place. While her hair dries, Peggy goes to the closet to select her armor. Her options are limited. It isn’t as if she has a fleet of outfits at her disposal. Most have more years on them than she cares to admit, although she takes great pains to care for them. Some of her clothes are even meant to dissuade the unwanted attention of the opposite sex, although she’s acutely aware that she’s never worn an outfit that Steve didn’t notice and appreciate. She flips through the dresses like a magazine, and comes across the last, hidden in the back. The same red dress she wore when she had bantered with Steve of “perfect partners” and “dancing,” with Bucky manning the watch of the hapless third wheel. She had brought the entire bar to a halt that night, but all she had cared about was Steve’s riveted attention.

Yes, this will do. She hates to repeat herself, but it’ll make do in a pinch.

Once she’s changed, she applies her war-paint, finishing it off with a swipe of her patented red lipstick. Her hair takes the longest, but Peggy manages with practiced ease. Once done, her appearance proven acceptable, Peggy circles about to set the stage, taking a page out of Steve’s handbook. Candlelight everywhere, songs piped in over the radio, she even tries her hand at dinner, although cooking is one of the few talents lost on her. The appearance of the pasta leaves much to be desired, but it’s the only thing she can manage with such limited ingredients. After she sets the table, Peggy sits and waits.

And waits.

And waits for an ungodly amount more.

It’s hours after Steve is supposed to come home that he finally walks through the door – or limps, as it were. Peggy shoots to her feet, the reprimand on tardiness falling from her lips as she takes in the sight of him. Busted lip, blood on his forehead, the blazer on his blue uniform torn and dirty, a far cry from standard regulations.

“Steve!” she shouts, shocked. “What on earth happened?”

He looks tired. “It looks worse than it is.”

“It looks like you were run over by a bus!”

“That’s an exaggeration,” he offers, wryly, pulling off his jacket with a wince. “It was just a car.” 

She stands there, mouth agape, taking a moment for the words to register. “You mean you actually were—”

“Unfortunately, yeah,” he says. It isn’t until that moment that he forces himself to meet her eyes, and then he’s the one staring at her. “Wow, Peg, you look…” he trails off, speechless.

“Yes, well.” Peggy sighs. “Flattery is less effective when you’re bleeding on the carpet. Come and sit down. Let me get a good look at your wounds. What happened?”

“Just an accident,” he manages, tight-lipped.

Peggy frowns. He’s lying, but it isn’t HYDRA, she can tell. Steve wouldn’t be secretive about an attack. 

Something about his gaze tells her an interrogation of questions will only close him off further. So, she retrieves the small first aid kit from the cupboard and intends to clean up his wounds. She needn’t have bothered, though. By the time she returns from the kitchen, he’s gone into the bathroom to clean himself off.

Peggy clutches the first aid kit with a frown. She follows him into the bathroom, collecting his ruined blazer hanging precariously on the doorknob, folding it neatly in halves. As smart as Steve is, he is still just a man, stubborn and dramatic, and she knows from the way he moves about that there is more bothering him than some superficial wounds. 

“I’m fine,” Steve says to her scrutiny. “Really, nothing to worry about, Peg.”

She wonders if her denials have been as half-hearted and ridiculous as his are. 

Propping her hip against a counter, she crosses her arms with his blazer still nestled in between. She watches him wipe ineffectually at some blood on his neck, waiting for him to ask for her assistance. He refuses, however, choosing to clean himself up in silence, as if she isn’t there watching him, as if he isn’t distracted by how much she enjoys when he takes his shirt off. The wounds on his back and shoulders (where, evidently, he took the brunt of the hit) have already healed, displaying muscles that she is now intimately familiar with but no less impressed by.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she ventures.

He stills at her words. "Not really."

"You’re not going to make me repeat myself, are you?” When he doesn't say anything, she prompts him, "I’m a fair bit skilled at getting answers, and I have no problems with getting creative with my tactics, Captain."

The shameless innuendo doesn’t illicit the blush she expects. He looks away, toeing off his shoes and unbuckling his belt. "Peg," he starts, and she knows immediately that something is wrong just from his tone. He's not one to lie to her, but just as unfathomably certain, she can read the achingly familiar hard lines of his body, the obstinate poise in the way he braces his hands against the sink. And she knows, with her entire being, that what he’s about to say is going to _hurt._ “I went looking for answers on why you’ve been lying to me.”

Peggy freezes. 

“I thought,” he manages, tightly, “I had your double cornered, but lost her in the traffic. She’s sticking around London, for some reason.”

She doesn’t know what to do, how to respond. A sigh of relief would give her away, a blanket denial will fool no one, and all she wants to do is brush away his concerns and hold him close.

“Say something, Peg.”

The moment shivers with everything she can't say. Peggy ultimately decides for the truth, the only one she can admit to. "I love you," she finds herself saying quietly, voice barely audible as her hands settle on his back. She turns him around so that he faces her, but she has to force his gaze to meet hers. “I love you in such a frightening way, it takes my breath away. There is nothing in this world that I love more, my darling. But you and I both know that there are things in this universe more important than any one person on Earth.”

“Which is your way of saying you’re hiding something from me,” Steve says, knowingly, painfully. “And it has to do with your double.”

“Yes,” she finally admits. “And my way of saying I can’t tell you what it is.”

He makes a face. “Is it classified?”

“Of a sort,” she manages. “Its’ secrecy is of utmost importance. It’s imperative to a great many lives that I don’t tell anyone, even you.” 

_Especially you_ , she doesn’t say.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he demands.

“I suppose my skills as a spy are hard to shed, even with you.”

“Don’t give me that, Peg,” he breathes harshly. “I wouldn’t lie to you about something like this.”

“If the world depended on it,” Peggy counters. “If, honest to god, the world depended on it, wouldn’t you?”

She has him there, and to his horror he discovers it in that beat, sighing, shaking free of her hold. He leaves the bathroom, and Peggy needs a moment to collect herself again before marching out into the main area to face him. The radio is still playing ridiculous love songs, and in that moment, she hates it with every fiber of her being.

“Is your life in danger?” he asks, bluntly.

“We’re at war,” she answers. “When isn’t it?”

“Peggy!” he blazes back, angrily. “Answer the damn question!”

She almost recoils because it's so unlike him to yell. Eventually, she admits quietly, “Yes.”

He closes his eyes, trying to regain some of his composure. “I know you can take care of yourself, but is it wrong of me to want to take care of you too?”

“No.” Peggy tries to find her words. “But I'm still going to ask you not to interfere.”

She can tell he'll never agree to that. “And this double is—”

“Don’t ask me anything about her, I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both,” she breathes out in a rough whisper. Her eyes are suddenly watering without her permission, but she clears her throat and tries to hold steady. “I can’t tell you anything, Steve. Please don’t ask.”

He’s shaking his head. “You can’t expect me to accept any of this.”

She searches for words, knowing in her heart that he won’t rest until he has a handle on the situation, until he – in his self-appointed role of Atlas, holding the Earth aloft on his shoulders – will find a way to save her from the possible god-forsaken future in front of her. A part of her wants him to do just that, but that’s the part her double warned her about. That’s the part, if all it was true, that she needs to fight.

“Can I ask,” she says, tightly, “did you feel her presence through the soulbond again?”

Steve looks up at her, and nods just once. 

That – more than anything, more than any proof her double provided, more than all the predictions coming true, the impossible childhood stories her double knew – proves it for Peggy. She trusts in Steve’s instincts more than she trusts in her own.

“You were right,” Peggy says. “That woman, that woman with my face – she is me. She is your soulbond, too. For both of us to be fighting for this secrecy, you must know it is vital. If you’ve ever loved me, if you’ve ever respected me, then respect my decision. Trust me.”

He looks like she's torn open his stomach and played about with his insides. 

“So,” he manages in a low voice, sounding broken. “You want me to do as Peggy says.”

She nods, pained. “Please, Steve, I’m begging you. Don’t ask me anything else.”

She wants to be as stiff-lipped and cold as her SSR reputation implies, as impervious to doubts and confusions as she’s told herself to be, but in that moment all she feels is a type of unease and grief that pains her to her very core. Tears escape the corners of her eyes, tumbling down her cheeks. The sight propels Steve from his frozen state, wrapping her up in his arms in a flash, holding her in a near bruising embrace. He sways her gently in some effort to offer comfort or accept it, she can’t decide, but Peggy clings to him desperately.

The song plays out over the radio, and distantly, she thinks they’re dancing, in a way almost too still to truly count. They’re finally having their dance, but it feels like a goodbye, like a painful farewell instead of a promise of the future she always imagined it to be.

“There has to be something I can do,” he pleads softly.

“There is,” she manages, gently. “Take me to bed. Hold me until the morning comes.” 

There is a bracing moment where she can feel him inhale and exhale. Then he cups her face, tilting her head up so that he can kiss her, and he uses a remarkable amount of restraint, given she can feel the emotions churning in him, the desperation, setting his pace slow as if to savor the moment. Her fingers curl possessively around him, and she feels a little delirious, losing time as he steers them into the bedroom, a long, staggering path full of unremitting kisses. 

He gently lays her down on a bed barely big enough for him, unzipping her red dress and tugging it free with reverence. That night, his mouth, his teeth, his hands – it leaves a mark everywhere he touches her, some invisible, some not, paying special attention to the soulmark near her collarbone, sucking a bruise over the mark like a welcomed branding, feeling like he is etching his touch into every piece of her. 

True to his promise, they don’t leave the bed until dawn.

#

The next week, right on schedule, Colonel Phillips holds a briefing based on Zola’s intelligence, and Howard says, _‘Schmidt’s working with powers beyond our capabilities. If he gets across the Atlantic, he will wipe out the entire Eastern seaboard in an hour._ ’ The exact words her double predicted.

Peggy doesn’t let her emotions show. She can’t afford to, but she wonders if Steve can feel it anyway through the bond.

He looks grim enough, certainly, as he sets out a game plan. “Why not?” he replies to Morita’s dry taunt that they can’t just knock on Schmidt’s front door. “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

Peggy doesn’t look at Steve. There’s no point.

She knows it’s time.

#


	6. Chapter 6

“Captain Rogers,” Peggy calls out after him.

She tries to get her bearings as the meeting adjourns, but Steve is already out of the door, his long strides carrying him swiftly down the corridor with purposeful steps. Peggy ignores the looks of the others as she gathers her things and hurries to catch up with him. 

“Captain Rogers,” she calls out again to no avail, then snaps, professionalism be damned. “Steve!”

That finally brings him to an abrupt halt at the end of the corridor. When she joins him, he isn’t looking at her.

“Are you all right?” she asks him. “You left the room rather quickly.”

Steve stares at her in amazement, and not the good kind. “Am I all right?” he asks, incredulous.

She’s never been a fan of Steve’s sarcasm, at least not when it’s aimed against her. “Not here,” she urges, as the hallway fills with the Howlies and Colonel Phillips as they exit the command room. She pulls him into one of the vacant rooms nearby, closing the door behind her. “Steve, you have to—”

“Save it, Peg. I’m calm.”

There is such a thing as dangerously calm. 

This isn’t easy for her either, but she can recognize the restrained energy radiating off Steve as an immediate concern. She has no idea how to make it better. Assurances would ring as false as lies; Steve knows her too well, probably knows her anxiety over the upcoming mission is more than the just the standard pre-mission jitters. His intuition in things has always been as razor sharp as a blade, but none in his arsenal is sharper than when it comes to her.

The voices of the Howlies pass by in the hallway, and Peggy restrains herself as she hears Dum Dum make a comment about the mission being _a chance in hell_ , and another man snorts in agreement. She can hear someone else’s hastening footsteps running down the corridor, calling out if anyone had seen Peggy – Howard’s voice, she can tell. No one offers Howard a clarification on her location, although the others must have seen Peggy and Steve slip into the room; she can only imagine what they assume the pair is up to behind these closed doors. The party marches passed them without interruption.

This is hardly the time to be doing this. They should be prepping for the upcoming battle. But the truth is, Peggy doesn’t have much time left.

“So,” Steve says to her, firmly. “This is it. This is what your double came to you about, isn’t it?”

Peggy doesn’t offer him the disrespect of lying, but she can’t force herself to answer. 

Steve nods, a familiar furrow between his brows. “You have to give me something to work with, Peg. I can’t be blind going into a mission of this importance. Red Skull could kill half the American eastern coast if we don’t—”

“I don’t have any information about that,” she cuts in. “I would give you that freely if I did. You know that.”

“You’re keeping secrets,” Steve counters, eyes level with purpose. “Beyond the personal, how am I supposed to command a team into battle when one of my own has intelligence that they’re not sharing.”

“I would never risk another’s life just to keep secrets.”

“Just your own,” Steve replies, frustrated, looking away. 

This is getting them nowhere. 

Decidedly, Peggy mentally fortifies herself, trying to square her jaw, square her shoulders, square damn near every corner inch of her body. It’s going to be a difficult day. She needs to steady on. But all of that nearly crumbles to dust when Steve looks back at her. The light in his eyes has faded, and he looks more tired than she’s ever seen him, even after some of their worst missions. Looking up at him, her heart starts hammering hard against her ribs.

“Come here,” she tells him hoarsely, pulling him blindly towards her. 

His arms circles around her waist, and she presses her cheek to his chest. She feels a kiss he places on the top of her head, and for a moment, Peggy doesn’t have to think about Schmidt or the Tesseract or her future timeline. She only has to breathe in the scent of Steve, etching the moment into memory, the way his arms feel around hers, the heat, the feeling of security and love. They stay like that for a time, but then she feels Steve start fumbling for something in his pocket. 

Peggy pulls back when he says, “I wanted to do this better, but I get the feeling I should do this sooner rather than later.”

He nervously pulls out a small velvet box, opening it up to reveal a modest ring. 

Peggy forgets to breathe.

“The papers kept calling you my wife,” he says, at first. “But I didn’t want to presume. I know we’re soulbonded but that doesn’t mean this has to be some foregone conclusion. I just know I love you in a way I couldn’t love anyone else even if I lived to be a hundred. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Peg.”

The words bring tears to her eyes because she wants nothing more, but Peggy knows she can’t promise the same. All she can promise him is today. By tomorrow, they’ll be pulled apart by nearly a century.

He sees her hesitation, and mistakes it for rejection. “Of course, you don’t have to answer right now—”

“No, no,” she rushes to stop him. “I mean, yes, of course! Of course, I want to be your wife!”

He breaks out into a grin, sweeping her up in a hug, spinning her around. For one brief moment Peggy decides to forget about her worries. She laughs into his shoulder before he plops her back down on her feet, kissing her. When they pull apart, she eagerly holds out her hand so that Steve can slid the ring on. Even as it’s happening, Peggy finds her mind drifting to the fact that this same ring hadn’t appeared on her double’s hand. It would have been a thing she would have noticed.

She smiles up at him, eyes watery with bittersweet joy. “I love you, Steve.”

“I love you, too.”

#

The elation lasts all too briefly, because they still have a battle to prepare for.

“Peggy!” Howard’s voice shoots out across the crowd. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Now’s not a good time,” she tells him, loading up a bag with supplies. She has the Thompson, the Walter PPK, a pair of Winchesters, and enough ammunition to storm Normandy itself, but she’ll probably need more. “We leave by dawn. You should be getting ready.”

“Already ahead of you, but I’ve got something for you. Figured now was a good a time as any to premiere it.”

The excitement in his voice would have been amusing – or alarming – any other day. “Howard, I really don’t have the time—”

“It’ll take just a second, Peggy, I promise. It’ll be worth it!”

She follows him to his lab, which is vacant for once instead of animated with its normal bustling energy. Peggy eyes the scattered models and machinery, some half assembled, others sitting neatly in their coves on the corner shelf. Howard just pulls Peggy along to the backroom, where a mannequin is dressed in another one of Steve’s prototypes for his uniform. Except, as Peggy grows near, she realizes it isn’t the same – the breastplate is different, fitted to accommodate a woman’s figure, a deeper shade of blue too; instead of the iconic American star blazoned on the front, the Union Flag is etched across the chest widely, a vibrant red cross edged in white and blue. 

“Whatdya think?” Howard beams. “I figured _Captain Britain_ should have a uniform of her own. It’s not quite finished, but it’s got a bunch of stellar features. I developed the suit with the same high-tech blast resistant qualities as Steve’s, but it’s more pliant, more breathable. Honestly, you might consider it as an upgrade.”

Peggy stands there speechless, warmed by his gift, but mostly overwhelmed. “Howard, you shouldn’t have.”

“Nonsense,” he replies. “You got nearly the same gifts as Steve, far as anyone can tell. Why shouldn’t you get the same treatment?”

Peggy still doesn’t know how to respond. She can bend a bar of steel with her bare hands. She can run a mile in under three minutes flat. Her healing is nearly instantaneous. She has nearly all of the agility and strength of Steve, with training that began years earlier.

Still, it isn’t often that Peggy is acknowledged as Steve’s equal. 

She finally finds her voice. “You’re a good man, Howard.”

The words have a dramatic effect on him, as if the man needed more of an ego to inflate. But as well as she’s come to know Howard these last few years, she knows his ego hides a whole foundation of issues regarding inadequacies and shortcomings. He believes too much in his intellect, and not enough in his character.

Howard goes about removing the uniform from the mannequin with a full-fledged grin. Before she can even wrap her mind fully on the uniform’s design, he’s shoving her towards the side door where she can change in privacy. 

Peggy quietly removes her clothing. As she pulls on the custom pair of fitted blue-dyed paratrooper trousers, a quiet somberness takes over her. She zips up the carbon polymer jacket, fitted to her measurements so precisely that she has to wonder how Howard knew them so well. She cinches the utility belt and handgun holster around her waist, adjusting the loops. Lastly, the combat gloves have ridges on them for extra grip, fitting snuggly around her hands, concealing the freshly polished gold on her ring finger. 

When she looks in the mirror, she wants to say she hardly recognizes herself except that isn’t true. She looks like her double. The other Peggy had worn an outfit that, although slightly modified and futuristic, bore many of the same qualities that Howard had designed. She realizes it, in that moment, what disarray she is willingly traveling towards, a destiny that awaits her on the other side of tomorrow. More than _realizes_ it, because she’s known for some time, but seeing it in the mirror so clearly is like a slap in the face, a wake-up call. 

By tomorrow, she’ll have lost everyone she’s ever known – her family, her friends back home, Howard, Bucky, the Howlies, Phillips.

_Steve._

She can’t do this. 

Duty be damned, she isn’t strong enough for this.

The moment of panic leads Peggy to do the one thing she’s refused to do since her double had left her in some abandoned factory. Peggy pulls out the earpiece that she’d been given, the one she’d kept tucked away in a small tin in the pockets of her regular trousers to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Slipping it on, she adjusts the hold, and she isn’t quite sure what to do at first – if she has to turn it on, fumbling with the position in her ear. Her gloved fingers press against a tiny button at the side of the device. It beeps, faintly.

“Hello,” she tries. “This is Peggy Carter, come in.”

A few more tries, and then her double’s voice comes on, crisp and familiar. “Agent Carter. I wasn’t expecting your call until tomorrow.”

“Change of plans,” she insists. “I need to meet you immediately.”

#

She changes out of the _Captain Britain_ uniform because it's hardly inconspicuous, and the last thing she needs is attention as she slips off the base the night before the SSR launches a heavily classified mission. Her double sets a rendezvous point in some old housing district, tufts of withered grass breaking through the broken concrete on the sidewalks outside. A man at the front of the building tips his hat to her in familiarity, calling her _Pepper,_ and Peggy forces a relaxed-looking smile in return as she trudges up the steps.

When her double opens the door, Peggy realizes it isn’t some safehouse, but a rented flat. “Quickly,” her double urges, “before anyone sees you.”

“Pepper?” Peggy offers as a question, as the door closes behind her.

“My alias,” her double replies. “Pepper Foster. Inside joke.”

The flat is modest, mostly unfurnished, almost depressingly so. There’s a wall in the back covered with various newspaper clippings, black and white photos pinned to the wall, connected by threadbare strings of reds and blues meant to illuminate some obscure timeline. It’s the only thing in the entire flat that has a speck of color, the otherwise dull grey walls void of personality or appeal. When Peggy comes closer, she sees a kaleidoscope of images that track HYDRA’s movements as well as the SSRs. Steve’s photo, Bucky’s – even her own – are all pinned to one side of the wall. Schmidt’s, Zola’s, and Chimera’s are pinned to the opposite end. 

“You’re probably wondering,” her double acknowledges, “why I didn’t take that down before you arrived, but this late in the game there’s little point. Why are you here?”

“I can’t do this,” Peggy says, cutting right to it. “There has to be another way.”

Her double sighs, closing her eyes and then settling down gingerly against a kitchen stool that serves, as far as Peggy can tell, as the singular chair in the entire flat. Her double is moving slowly, the telltale sign that whatever ailments had plagued her before because of the quantum suit have progressively worsened.

“I wish there was another way,” her double says. “But there isn’t.”

“I can’t leave Steve behind. We have to come up with some other way.”

Her double pauses, sympathetic but firm. “The mission is tomorrow.”

“I’m talented with improvisation.”

“You’ll find that time-travel doesn’t react well to that. There is no other way, Peggy. I’ve thought about this far longer than you, and with far more understanding of what’s at stake. The price you’re going to pay is going to be devastating, but you _have_ to pay it.”

“I can’t accept that.”

“Then accept that I’m dying,” her double counters, not unkindly. “And accept that if I don’t go back to 2023 with both Infinity Stones, trillions of lives will be lost forever. And all of that, unjustly or not, is something you could prevent.”

That quells whatever Peggy has to say next.

“Maybe I should have lied to you?” the other Peggy continues, almost to herself. “Maybe I shouldn’t have burdened you with foreknowledge? But I thought you deserved to know the truth. At least that much is owed to you.”

Peggy scrubs a hand over her face, turning away, but she hears her double’s soft gasp. When she looks back, the older woman is studying her hand – the ring finger, in particular. 

“He finally gave you the ring?” her double asks, sounding breathless. 

Peggy fidgets with the ring uncomfortably. “He didn’t, with you?”

Her double shakes her head, eyes misting. “He wanted to wait until the right moment, which in my timeline came far too late. He always regretted that.”

“You—” Peggy starts. “You mean he’s still alive, in the future? You still have him?”

Her double pauses, warring with herself over how much to divulge, then finally nods reluctantly. “He’s older, of course. He would have you believe too old for us.”

Peggy stares at her double, knowingly. “You don’t have such qualms.”

“He’s _Steve_ ,” her double manages with some composure, smiling. “I don’t care how much older he is than me. Really, he’s still distinguished and handsome. It’s almost a crime at that age.”

“But,” Peggy tries, wrapping her mind around the implications, “he doesn’t agree?”

The older woman frets briefly. Grudgingly, she admits, “He thinks he’s holding me back from living my life. The idiot doesn’t seem to realize how stupid that is.”

Of course. Stubborn and self-effacing to a fault. That’s Steve.

“Still,” Peggy manages, clinging onto whatever she can. “You have him.”

“I do,” her double agrees softly. It’s a singular piece in an otherwise frightening future, knowing Steve is there, but it’s soothing nonetheless. “I know you’re scared. You have every right to be, but this isn’t the moment for doubt. We can’t afford it.”

“What happens to him?” Peggy asks. “I won’t go through with tomorrow without knowing he’ll be all right.”

Her double sighs. “You’re asking questions I shouldn’t be answering.”

“Who’s to judge for that?” Peggy blazes back, angrily. “You? What right do you have to decide what’s best for me to know? You may be some version of me, but you never had to knowingly sacrifice Steve in the manner you’re asking me to do. Losing Steve was _done to you_. You’re asking me to do it to _myself_. I can assure you it isn’t the same thing.”

Slowly, resignation and recrimination fall like shadows across her double’s face. “All right,” she breathes, placating. “All right. He becomes the Director of Shield, the organization that follows after the SSR. Captain America certainly doesn’t go away, but it fades to the history books. He serves his country – the world, really – in other ways, ultimately far better and more suited for him.”

“Does he—does he move on? Find someone else?”

There is a weighted pause. “No. He tried, briefly. Without success.”

It’s the thing she feared, that he would always hold onto the memory of her, preventing him from living his life fully. Anyone would flop in comparison to the impossible standards of a soulbonded ghost. She would find it frustrating, if she didn’t also realize anyone that followed Steve for her would have the same insurmountable benchmarks to surpass.

Fools. The pair of them are fools.

“The future isn’t all bad,” her double says. “The rampant sexism isn’t quite so rampant, although it could certainly be better. I’m godmother to Howard’s granddaughter. I have friends that have become family. I’m not alone.”

Peggy quietly absorbs that. She has to admit, considering where she was mentally only hours before, she’s calmed somewhat. At least she has some answers. “Thank you,” Peggy finds herself saying, “for telling me the truth.”

“Like I said, I wouldn’t want to be lied to. You have the right to know why you’re sacrificing so much.” But abruptly, the other Peggy shoots to her feet, far more alert than she had been a few seconds ago. “Were you followed here?”

“What?” Peggy says, offended. “Of course not.”

Her double doesn’t share the confidence. She moves to the window, then closes her eyes – and Peggy realizes it in the same instance. _Steve._ They both feel his presence nearby, a soft simmering current through the soulbond. A second later, there’s a fleeting noise of the window opening from the other room, presumably the attached bedroom. 

Reality crashes into Peggy as footsteps approach.

When Steve finally emerges through the bedroom door, his face is an impassive mask as he greets the pair standing before him. His eyes sweep from Peggy to her double, then back to Peggy again in silence. His shield is at his back, and an identical one rests idly in the corner of her double’s flat. Peggy is too addled to speak, warring with explanations that fall far too short of anything reasonable or believable. 

Her double is the first to break the hush. “I assume,” she speaks up, roughly, “you overheard everything?”

“Enough of it,” he answers her.

“Steve,” Peggy tries, but she can't find the words. 

He’s quiet for a very long time. “Start from the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”

#

Steve listens with the same subdued expression that he makes when reports of fallen troops and massive civilian casualities come in. There is no disbelief. No incredulous gasp at the impossible story her double lays out, the same one Peggy herself had heard not two weeks back with far less aplomb. He just stands there, arms folded over his chest, leaning against the wall, quietly absorbing everything.

“So,” he says, when the story is all said and done. “We have to get a hold of the Tesseract.”

Her double pauses. “It’s not that easy. Even after we retrieve it from Red Skull, there’s the matter that Peggy has to be the one to fly the Valkyrie into the ocean. Otherwise none of this time heist becomes possible in the first place.”

“Time heist?” Peggy repeats incredulous.

“It’s not,” her double starts, embarrassed, “that wasn’t a term I personally coined.”

Steve says, “You saved Bucky’s life. Where was the rigid faith to the timeline there?”

Her double looks away. “That isn’t the same as what needs to happen to Peggy. And you're right, in a way. I may have irrevocably altered the timeline because I was playing by impulse and emotion. I didn't stop to think about the repercussions in the future, and there will be, no doubt. Just because I decided to save Bucky decades of pain. I have to answer for that.” 

Steve stares back, the moment between Peggy’s double and her soulbond shivering with tension. 

“I agreed to all of this, Steve,” Peggy finds herself compelled to say. “She hasn’t made me do anything.”

Steve releases a harsh breath. “No one can make you do anything you don’t want to do, Peg. I don’t need to be told that.” He pauses only briefly, brimming with repressed emotions. “What else am I missing?” he asks. “You have the Reality Stone. You need the Tesseract. Your suit is damaged. How do we know it’s even going to take you home?”

“We don’t,” her double answers. “But it’s our only shot. It has to work.”

“And if it doesn’t?” he asks.

“It has to,” her double affirms, like there is no room to entertain anything else.

That answer doesn’t suit Steve, who pushes off the wall and paces to the window. He looks out, shoulders taut and face grim, staring out at the city like there’s some hidden answer etched on the horizon. But her double is right, and Peggy, in the wake of her ephemeral moment of doubt, knows it too. They have their solution. It isn’t ideal, but at least now everyone is in on it. At least she no longer has to deceive Steve, a move that felt tacitly like betrayal.

“We have an opportunity to set so much on the right path,” her double says, almost pleading. “You have to let her go, Steve.”

“I can’t accept that,” Steve answers flatly.

“Neither did my Steve,” her double says. “He spent years looking for me, trying to find me in the ice. It didn’t make a difference in the end.” 

Steve’s gaze softens, as does his voice, “You’ve been through hell and back, and I can’t imagine what it feels like. I can’t imagine the burden. But we don’t trade lives.”

“You’re only saying that because, for once,” her double counters, looking both fond and exasperated with Steve, “it’s not your life on the line. You’d sacrifice yourself in a heartbeat, but you can’t stand the idea of losing _her_.”

Steve’s jaw clenches, then releases with a slow exhale. “Maybe you’re right. Peggy matters to me. What happened to _you_ matters to me,” he says to her double. “There has to be another way. We know now, what’s coming. We have more than seventy years to plan for Thanos’ arrival.”

“You’re risking too much,” her double says, sighing. “Besides, even if you did manage to prevent Thanos somehow in this timeline, that won’t help _my_ time, Steve, _my_ people. It’ll only help yours.”

“I thought they were the same thing?” Peggy says.

“No. Time travel isn’t linear, at least as the theory was explained to me. It’s a series of parallel worlds. When I came here, I created a parallel world. Let's call this Universe A. I have to take the Infinity Stones back to my time, my people, my universe. Universe B.”

“Parallel worlds?” Peggy asks.

Her double struggles for a moment to come up with an explanation. “Look at your ring. If time was strictly linear, then everything happening to you now would have already happened to me. I’d be sitting here with that same ring on my finger. But time travel doesn’t work like that. I changed our realities, split them into parallel worlds when I came here. You could go on to save this universe, but when I travel back to mine, Thanos will still have won in the Universe B version.”

It’s all too much to wrap her mind around. Any way she cuts this, Peggy has to sacrifice herself. 

“If you’ll excuse me,” Peggy says, needing a moment. 

Peggy quietly slips into the bathroom, splashing cold water onto her face. Outside the door, she can hear the pair whispering, talking in hushed tones, a predicable continuing ballet of arguments. Peggy truly despises it when people talk about her as if she isn’t around and doesn’t have a say in the things happening to her. She can pick up on the conversation because her hearing is nearly as good as a bat now, so Peggy spins the faucet on the tub hard enough that the water comes out rushing; it’s not enough to obscure the voices. Peggy scrubs a hand across her face, resting at her neck, needing a moment of silence to herself. 

Instead, she spends the next few minutes being made to bear witness to a brief and not-so-silent argument between Steve and her double, most of which is stewed in latent tension that Peggy refuses to tell them she understands isn’t entirely negatively based. Peggy would have to be blind not to notice the way her double fixates on Steve, wherever he is in the room, barely able to take her eyes off him. And Steve has never denied his attraction towards her double, even after he knew it brought out the green monster in Peggy. Ridiculous, all of this. Ludicrous to the point of obscene.

The strain between Steve and her double drifts in, suffocating, but eventually she can feel Steve softening over the bond, somewhat mollified by something her double says. The briefest tendrils of affection and attraction glides in, but before Peggy can respond, there’s a sharp cry from her double and the clang of something falling.

Peggy rushes back to the room to find another bioelectric malfunction has taking over her double’s suit, causing convulsions. Steve is on the floor beside the other Peggy, helpless, and he trades a startled look with Peggy as she rushes to his side.

“We have to let it play out,” Peggy says, pained. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Beside her, Steve is silent.

Eventually, the convulsions subside. Her double groans, and they both help her to sit up again. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she breathes out, roughly. “I just need a moment.”

“You need a doctor,” Steve counters.

Her double gives an undignified snort. “That won’t do a thing.”

“Can we get someone to look at your suit?” Steve tries. “Howard?”

“No,” her double shakes her head. “This is beyond even what he would understand. I only have to make it to tomorrow, which I will. Once I’m back to my timeline, the quantum suit won’t be an issue anymore.”

“There has to be something we can do,” Steve presses. 

Her double sees the worry on his face, and tightly nods. “Food. I’ve barely eaten all day.”

“Peggy,” he chides softly, an all too familiar reprimanding tone.

Her double lifts her chin up defiantly. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

Peggy feels déjà vu or something else, some odd sense or emotion that hasn’t been named yet because she doubts this particular set of circumstances have ever transpired before. They help her double to her feet, and Steve goes to the kitchen to retrieve food. When he closes the fridge door, his shoulders have fallen a little in frustration. He drops something angrily into the trash bin. 

“The food here is rotten,” he bites out between gritted teeth. “I’ll be back. Five minutes, tops.”

But as soon as he leaves the flat, her double struggles to her feet; Peggy opens her mouth, orders to rest poised on her lips, but her double raises a hand to halt her. She listens for Steve’s retreating footsteps down the hall, waiting until she’s positive he’s out of earshot. 

“I must leave,” her double announces, tiredly.

“What? Why?”

“Steve is asking too many questions,” her double answers, groaning as she moves. She goes to the cupboard and grabs a small bag that is already half filled. “He won’t relent, and to be frank, I’m not in the condition to deal with any of this. I need to get out. I know I’ll never be able to convince Steve, but I hope I managed to reach you?”

After a pause, Peggy nods. “I know what I have to do.”

“Good,” her double returns, tightly. She hands Peggy a small black circular device, barely the size of her palm. “This is called a Black Widow’s bite, an electroshock weapon. I've recalibrated it to have a stronger current, something that'll kill a normal man. Against someone as strong as Red Skull, you’ll incapacitate him for a few moments. When the time comes, use it. I’ll meet you on the Valkyrie, where I’ll take the Tesseract off your hands.”

“How will you get on board?”

“Don’t worry about that,” her double answers, picking up her shield and hoisting it onto her back. “Only concern yourself with what you have to do tomorrow. Steve won’t let this happen easily.”

“I know,” Peggy answers softly.

“I’m sorry,” she says back. “And Godspeed.”

#

When Steve returns, he doesn’t look entirely surprised that her double is gone. Peggy has the grace to offer him a sheepish look from the floor where she sits, knees drawn up to her chest. He slowly moves to settle down beside her, closing his eyes and resting his head back against the wall in a candid moment of exhaustion. They stare out at her double’s empty apartment in silence for a long moment, taking in the depressing singular stool, the lack of anything personal, the wall full of obsessive pictures. It paints a grim picture of how her double survived these last few weeks.

She takes his hand in hers, admiring the subtle beauty of his long fingers, the graceful lines. 

“You can’t do this, Peg,” Steve says. “You can’t get on that plane tomorrow.”

“Steve, I’m already tired of having this conversation.”

“Tell me you’re not going through with her plan, and the conversation is over just like that.”

If only it were that simple.

“There is a world out there that needs my help,” Peggy answers. “How I am supposed to say no to that?”

“We help,” he counters. “Just not the way it happened to her. I can’t stand the idea of you going through that.”

“Neither can I,” she says. “You think I don’t want to become your wife? You think I don’t desperately want you as my husband?”

“Then let’s find a way to make that happen. Save the universe, yes, but toget—”

She cuts him off with a kiss. 

There’s no point in arguing with him anymore. Neither will convince the other. 

He pulls back. “Don’t, Peg. Don’t try to distract me.”

“This isn’t a distraction,” she insists, but slowly climbs onto his lap, leisurely adjusting herself so that her knees are on either side of him. The floor is slightly dirty, but Peggy doesn’t mind. She leans down to kiss his neck, paying special attention to where his pulse beats, a particularly sensitive spot for him. “This is solace,” she says between kisses. “This is comfort.” 

“This is hot air,” Steve replies, but groans lightly when she sucks a near bruise at his neck. She meets his gaze, watching him swallow forcefully, throat full of lines that Michelangelo couldn’t dream to draw, the sharp cheekbones, his parted lips. “I’m not losing you tomorrow,” he breathes out, heavily. “Even if I have to order the entire base to keep you locked up.”

She smiles brazenly. “Oh, Steve. Always so dramatic.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“No,” she agrees. “It isn’t. But you and I both know you can do your level best to stop me tomorrow, even convince Phillips to keep me on base. It won’t make a difference. I’ll find my way there. This is my fight as much as yours. I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. I just know I am going to be there by your side no matter what. And I don’t want to spend tonight fighting with you about it, do you?”

He looks so pained and lost in that moment, grief and anger fueling his emotions. When he kisses her again, he’s already working to take off her clothes and Peggy hums appreciatively. He must realize the precious few hours they may have left, too, because it isn’t long before he’s pressed against her, then inside her, muttering her name in a dark voice with words like _love_ and _need_ and _want_ as he thrusts up into her. She must be desperate for his touch, almost touch-starved, because it doesn’t take long before her body shatters apart under his strokes.

"Shh," Steve mumbles against her neck, clutching her body as it goes slack over him. "I've got you. I've got you."

#

Several hours after they’ve christened her double’s flat, Steve is breathing hard, standing next to Peggy as they survey the carnage spread out across the land. In the handful of missions Peggy has joined with the Commandos, one of which ended with Bucky losing an arm, this is by far the worst. HYDRA’s men easily outnumber the SSR soldiers three to one, and Steve isn’t playing at his best either, distracted and too focused on keeping one eye on Peggy at all times.

She chambers a round into her shotgun and puts her spare gun back in her thigh holster. Four HYRDA soldiers lay littered on the floor. She’s still getting used to Howard’s _Captain Britain_ uniform. She’d made quite the splash with Steve, striding down the aircraft ramp in matching outfits. It was almost a little absurd, but no one had made a remark other than an appreciative whistle or two from the peanut gallery. Steve had glared that into silence, but Peggy had bigger concerns.

Side by side, they had launched their initial attack on the HYDRA camp. 

Despite their relatively comparable strengths and agilities, Steve’s fighting style is completely different from hers. He seems intent to use his entire body as a weapon, often hurling himself against tanks and assailants like a wrecking ball; Peggy prefers the school of thought that beating her opponents with blunt force objects until they simply stopped moving was a tried and true method of attack. The dynamic works, but if they have to raid the HYDRA base, the least they could do is break through the bloody defenses. It’s an impenetrable force. 

Steve refuses to play his part, the plan he’d come up with himself only less than twenty-four hours earlier. He was supposed to get captured by Schmidt’s men. He was supposed to let them take him back to the Red Skull himself, at which point the Commandos would use the element of surprise to break in. 

But he refuses to leave her side.

If the Commandos notice his overprotectiveness, they don’t comment about it. However, not all of the SSR troops, of which Phillips had brought practically a full battalion, share such discretion. 

“Fuckin’ ridiculous,” a trooper mutters, far enough away that if she had normal hearing, she wouldn’t have heard it. “This is why women shouldn’t be at war. She’s turned Captain America into a lovesick puppy who just follows her around. What is she even doing here? She gonna scare the enemy by batting her eyelashes? I tell ya, I wish I could give her a piece of my mind – or a piece of something, alright!” 

The comment receives uproarious laughter.

Peggy is in no mood. A hush quickly falls as she marches her way to the group gathered around the self-imposed jester. Peggy has always managed to walk with purpose, with confidence, a type that usually intimidates small-minded men. The trooper is no different. Quick assured strides bring her swiftly to him, where his eyes widen like saucers at the approach. 

But when she reaches him, Peggy only offers, flatly, “Don’t worry about what I’ll be doing to the enemy. I’d worry more about what I could do to you.” 

“Ma’am,” he gulps, all bravado lost.

She knew it wouldn't take much to set him right. Bullies are only cowards by another name.

Behind them, Dum Dum hollers, “She’s a Captain now, trooper. I believe you owe her a salute!”

He gives a quick salute, which Peggy finds a little much, given there’s no official rank and the name of _Captain Britain_ is one bestowed upon her by the press. Still, she doesn’t comment, turning away.

She isn’t feeling charitable after that, and finds Steve assembling a small group nearby. She pulls him to the side, hissing, “Either do your job or I will, Captain. You had a ridiculous scheme to get captured in order to infiltrate their base, and while it is far from the perfect plan, it’s a sight better than our current situation. Now, ask yourself, who do you want captured by Red Skull? You or me? Because it’s going to be one of us.”

His lips press into a thin line. 

#

Peggy watches from her binoculars as he makes it to the base and then unilaterally starts taking out Red Skull’s men one-by-one with nothing more than his shield and his body. There is no shortage of enemies, but Steve attacks with the same aggression he's been using all day, like he's releasing pent-up frustration from a volcano, knocking HYRDA men down left and right with a brutality he standardly never revels in. His normal composure under pressure is buried beneath a weight that only Peggy can recognize. She almost feels sorry for the HYDRA soldiers.

“Can you even see anything with that thing?” Dum Dum grunts, squinting into his own binoculars with annoyance.

“He’s fighting them off single-handedly,” Peggy informs him, trying to subdue the blatant appreciation in her voice. “He may pull this raid off without his hairbrained scheme of getting captured.”

But, of course, she’s speaks too soon. 

She watches from a distance more than few thousand meters away as he’s surrounded by dozens of Red Skull’s men. They take him prisoner, escorting him through the front gates of the facility with a small army at his back.

“All right,” she declares. “He’s in. It’s time.”

The Commandos position themselves at the nearest peak in the mountain. It takes some doing, but the line of sight into Schmidt’s glass-framed command center lets Peggy watch through binoculars as Steve trades barbs with the man suitably called “Red Skull” for a reason. 

She moves towards the others, grabbing one of the several grappling guns, and shoots it towards Schmidt’s center of operations. When she starts repelling down the line, smashing through the windows with Dum Dum and Gabe Jones on either side of her, chaos erupts. A firefight breaks out, providing Steve with the perfect cover to break free of his restraints.

“You’re late,” he says cheekily, popping back up on his feet to stride towards her. 

She would kiss him if they weren’t in the middle of a gunfight. 

As it is, the next few minutes pass by in a blur. Phillips storms the castle with hundreds of SSR troops, and in the chaos, she sees Red Skull flee towards the hangar. He races through a doorway, hits a button, and the blast doors starts descending immediately.

“Steve!” she shouts. “Shield!”

He responds to her command quickly, hurling his shield with precision, jamming the doors open. Just enough for Peggy to slip through. She rushes through the door, aware Steve is right behind her, yanking the shield loose to affix on his back after he ducks under and through. The hangar is enormous, but there’s a large stealth bomber plane that Peggy knows is the _Valkyrie,_ loaded up with enough bombs to flatten New York City into nothing but rubble _._ The plane starts moving down the runway.

“You’re not getting on that plane,” Steve warns her. 

She knows he’s serious. She knows he’ll never let her board that plane after Schmidt. He might even be willing to fight her on it. 

The moment is now or never. 

“Then, for luck,” she tells him agreeably, dragging him into a kiss.

The embrace is swift and potent, like a gunshot, but when he pulls back, she can see the relief in his eyes, the moment when he thinks she’s going to let him save her. The marveled gaze makes it all the more painful when Peggy furtively slips out the Black Widow bite. Steve’s body starts convulsing as the blue current bursts through him, dropping him to the floor. He groans, disoriented, and Peggy quickly checks him over to make sure no real damage has been done.

“I’m sorry, my darling,” she breathes to his prone form. “This is the only way.”

At the far end of the runway, the outside doors part open, letting in the glare of daylight. Peggy pivots, chasing after the Valkyrie as the huge bomber picks up speed. She moves like lightning, faster than she’s ever run before, faster even than perhaps Steve has ever run. The door to the plane is almost within reach, but even as she catches up to it, she realizes she can’t pry it open with her bare hands. She has no way of catching purchase or getting onboard.

Out of nowhere, Steve’s shield comes racing through the air, hitting the plane door with such force it caves it in. Peggy jumps onto the plane as it takes off, and she looks back at the hanger, seeing Steve standing on the platform, a solemn figure retreating into a distant spec as the plane rises in altitude.

Peggy picks up Steve’s fallen shield, fully aware she wouldn’t have managed to board the plane without his last second assistance. Even deceived, even against his own wishes, Steve had been there to help her do what she must. She doesn’t know what the future holds, but one thing, Peggy knows for certain. Even if she lives to be a thousand years old, she’ll never find a better man. 

After that, she searches through the large bomber, hunting for Schmidt and the Tesseract, knowing both are somewhere on the plane. Along the way, she dispatches more of HYDRA’s sentinels, but the pursuit takes longer than she imagined before she finally makes it to the cockpit. The place is massive, covered in glass and chrome, with a bright blue light emerging from some center console.

The Tesseract.

“Ah, the soulbond,” Johann Schmidt calls out, derisively, spinning around in the pilot's chair. Peggy discovers the face of a monster. She’d heard reports, but seeing it this up front is another thing. “I had thought it was Captain America that had been foolish enough to follow me, but no. I am subjected to the humiliation of being pursued by his bride.”

“This is only the beginning of your humiliation,” Peggy replies.

She quickly takes out his co-pilot in the corner with Steve’s shield. It ricochets back into Peggy’s hands, and Schmidt looks amused. “Fräulein, you have no idea who you are dealing with. You are nothing more than the rib of Adam. I wanted you so that I could figure out how to siphon away what the good doctor gave Captain Rogers, but you’re just a shadow. A woman. You put a flag on your chest and think you fight for a nation? I have seen the future! There are no flags! Not in the future I create!”

“Not in my future,” her double announces, from a dark corner. 

She emerges from the shadows, knocking Schmidt down with her own shield, the spinning disk slamming into his ribs so hard he goes flying back. He hits the cube console. Blue energy arcs and crackles from the damaged machinery. Red Skull pulls himself to his feet, staring in alarm as the cube rises from the machine, glowing with a violent intensity. He stares, reaching out to extract the cube, and Peggy rushes forward to intercept, but her double stops her.

“Let this happen,” her double urges.

Peggy gapes as the cube burns the glove off Skull’s hand, exposing scarred flesh underneath. Red Skull just continues to stare, overcome and amazed by the blinding blue light, then vanishes into thin air.

There is a beat of silence. 

“Where did he go?” Peggy breathes in awe.

“I honestly have no idea,” her double responds. “But he’s never a problem for Earth again, so good riddance.”

The cube is already burning a hole through the floor of the cockpit, but her double hobbles forward favoring her left leg with a wince. Peggy doesn’t comment on the injury, figuring it’s a complication in her attempt to get onboard. Despite the volatile nature of the cube, Peggy’s gloves withstand the heat as she picks it up and secures it in the container she kept in the corner. There’s a second container as well, carrying Substance X – or the Reality Stone, as her double calls it. It certainly didn’t have the properties of a stone, a red floating substance dancing mid-air in the glass container.

The plane jostles with turbulence, almost causing the containers to hit the floor and shatter. Peggy catches the red substance as it rolls across the floor, holding it up with bated breath, knowing the volatile nature could cause an explosion at any second. She gingerly brings it back over to the other Peggy.

“Thank you,” her double says, with weight behind the words. 

She looks tired and pale, but in that moment, very, very grateful. 

“Yes, well, I have the feeling the hard part is just beginning,” Peggy returns. “Are you sure you’ll be able to return home?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” She rises slowly to her feet, placing both containers in a small bag that she shrugs over her shoulder. “I’d say we’ll see each other on the other side, but that’s not how any of this works.”

Of course. “Any last advice?”

Her double does a miserable excuse for a smile. “Tell Steve you’ll be all right, when you say your goodbye.”

“Will I be?” 

This time, the smile is a little more genuine. “The first face you see when you wake up belongs to Steve. Yes, older, more stoic – but still, forever your Steve. Take comfort in that.”

With a small tap of some button on her wrist, the other Peggy disappears. 

Peggy might have stared for all eternity at the empty spot where her double had blinked out of existence, had it not been for another bout of turbulence. Peggy pitches forward towards the control stick, but as predicted, the plane is steering automatically with no override. A green map of Manhattan is lit up on the monitor to the right.

Peggy sits heavily, reaching for the radio. “Captain Rogers, come in.”

His voice comes on with a static burst. _“P—ggy? Is that you? Are you okay?”_

“I’m fine. Schmidt’s gone. He’s… dead.” It’s as accurate as she could describe it.

_“Get back here right now, Peg.”_

She pauses. “You know I can’t do that.”

 _“No, no! Give me your coordinates. I’ll find you a place to land—"_

“There isn’t going to be a landing.” She reads the gages in front. “There’s enough power to reach the East Coast. It’s everything we feared, Steve.”

_“I’ll get Howard on the line. He’ll know what to do.”_

“No, Steve.” She’s staring out at the vast blue ocean, with inescapable snow surrounding her for miles. Her coffin for the next seven decades. “You know there are no options. I have to crash it.”

_“No, Peg, don’t do this. We talked about this. There’s other ways.”_

There really isn’t. “Steve, this is my choice. I have to do this, and it has to be soon before a lot of people get hurt. You know this. I’ll be all right.”

She yanks out the cables on the console, sparks flying everywhere, the lights in the cabin dying. She hears the engine stop. The plane goes quiet.

 _“You said you’d marry me,”_ Steve says. _“You said you wanted me to be your husband. I’m holding you to that.”_

She gives a watery smile. “We’ll keep the wedding small. Just a handful of people.”

_“I’ll find you, Peg. I swear I won’t give up.”_

He’ll be the first thing she sees when she wakes up. Peggy leans on the center stick with all her might. The plane begins a screaming dive. “I’m so sorry, my darling.” She closes her eyes as the snow-covered terrain rushes towards her. “I love you, Steve. I love you so m—”

#


	7. Chapter 7

**EPILOGUE**

Steve watches the high-spirited crowds bustle through the Brooklyn streets, saying nothing. 

A peal of laughter shoots through the air around him. Before the serum, before the war, he loved sitting in busy places, sketching people in their day-to-day lives. He used to be able to sit for hours just drawing whatever was around him, getting inspirations from a passing smile on a stranger’s face, or the light hitting just right off the river, making even the ugliest of Brooklyn bridges seem brighter and new. He knows the people have earned every shout of joy, every passing smile, but instead it feels like torture, the mundane task of sitting in a café two months after V-E Day feeling like the war has ended for everybody but him. 

After the HYDRA bases had fallen, after Red Skull had been killed off, it took less time than he imagined in winning the war. Germany had limped along for a few more months until the war had ended with an unconditional surrender. Senator Brandt had wanted to throw a ticker tape parade in Captain America’s honor, right through the heart of New York, but Steve had flatly refused. Bucky and the Howlies had been requisitioned in his stead. 

The parade has been over for nearly an hour, now. Steve’s spent most of it out in a courtyard, sipping quietly from his cup, eyeing the rushing traffic of cars loggerheaded against each other, people greeting each other openly in the streets with hugs, handshakes, and enthusiastic kisses. Soldiers are still being discharged by the droves as the weeks pass by, but he can spot the army men from the civilians just by the way they walk, even if a few of them are already out of uniform. The shoes, the pace, the stiffness with which they move. He knows the guy sitting at the table to the right of him has come home from the front lines of Germany; Steve can tell he’s meeting a girl, maybe one he hasn’t seen in months or years – the modest handful of flowers is a dead giveaway. At the same time, Steve can spy the tremors in the soldier’s hands, the shakes he’s seen in men more than once, covered up with a clenched fist and a bottle of booze that keeps quietly filling his cooling cup of joe.

Steve tries to find the peace in sitting quietly for a long time, just watching people, but the letter in his hands proves a distraction to everything else. A letter from Peggy, written days before she’d aimed the _Valkyrie_ into a steep dive towards a canyon of snow. He’s read it a thousand times at this point, a well-meaning if tormenting letter telling him to move on, find happiness and love, to not wait for her. _I’ve made my decision, Steve. Now you have to make yours._ _I pray it’ll be one to move towards the light._

“Steve!” Bucky calls, from across the road. He’s still in his dress blue uniform, with one sleeve of his arm tucked in and pinned to his shoulder, an ever-growing cluster of medals fastened to his chest. His ma had cried something fierce when she’d seen him. “There you are, man. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Been here, mostly,” Steve answers, folding the letter into quarters, slipping it carefully into his pocket. “How’d it go?”

“Loudly,” Bucky answers with a grunt.

Steve squints against the sun as Bucky gets stopped by a few passing pedestrians, some bashful hellos from female admirers. Some things never change. All of them recognize Bucky from the parade, but Steve slumps lower in his seat and pulls the ballcap over his eyes more heavily. He doesn’t want to be recognized any more than he wants to deal with glad-handing politicians, but he knows with Buck around it’ll only be a matter of time before people make the obvious connections. 

Bucky takes a seat opposite Steve, settling down with a grunt. “It’s a little crazy, ain’t it? Being here. This place used to be an automat, right?”

Steve nods quietly, saying nothing.

“My sisters invited you over for dinner again,” Bucky says. “They’ve made a big fuss every day since I’ve been home. You gotta come in and take the spotlight off me for a beat. It’ll be a favor, Steve, I’m telling you.”

Steve manages a smile. “Thanks, Buck. Maybe next time. Right now, I’m—”

“What? Busy staring aimlessly into space? You’ve been doing that since you left Europe. How about you notice we won the war?”

Next to them, a high-pitched shriek erupts; the jittery soldier has finally reunited with his girl, a round of joyous smiles and laughter pealing through the air as he sweeps her off her feet and kisses her roundly.

Steve lifts an eyebrow at Buck. “I noticed.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Ignore that. Come have dinner with me, Steve. It’ll be like old times.”

For a beat, he’s tempted. For a beat, it sounds like it would be nice. But then he remembers Peggy’s voice, tear-filled and rough, telling him she loved him. He remembers trying to hail her for a long time after that, being met with static silence. He remembers grabbing Howard to fly through the Artic for weeks after, one boundless slideshow of virgin snow and endless ocean.

It isn’t right, him enjoying a nice dinner with family and friends. 

It isn’t right when she’s out there somewhere frozen in some godforsaken HYDRA plane.

It just isn’t right.

“Next time,” Steve says.

Bucky exhales harshly, almost a grunt, but nods his head indulging. “Yeah. Next time.”

#

He gets a call from Howard two weeks after that, telling him they’ve found the Tesseract. 

At first, Steve doesn’t think he heard right. At first, he’s positive that Howard is wrong – but the man, for all his various faults and philandering, is almost never wrong when it comes to his discipline with science. Except Steve knows just as well that Howard had searched for the Tesseract’s energy signature for weeks, without success. He knows that Howard hadn’t had a chance in hell of finding it because it was eight decades into the future, being used to restore order and save countless lives. Steve knows it’s impossible to have found the Tesseract.

But Howard insists he has, saying he’s burned through six containers trying to find something that could hold it. “The energy signature just pinged out of nowhere today, in the middle of the ocean, after months of blind search. It’s like a miracle! If we found it in the ocean, the _Valkyrie_ can’t be that far off. We’ve got a chance, my friend! We can still find her.”

Steve, against himself, feels a flicker of hope. He almost volunteers right then and there to jump on a plane back to the Artic to join Howard’s expedition. He’s done that more than a dozen times already in the last few months.

But something warns him it doesn’t make sense. Something warns Steve to sit still.

He goes through the possibilities the rest of the night, long after hanging up the phone. Peggy – the other Peggy, the future one – told him she’d take both the Tesseract and the Reality Stone back to the future. She told him it was vital in defeating Thanos. But if it was lying in waste at the bottom of the ocean, did that mean she’d been unsuccessful in returning to her timeline?

No. Steve won’t accept that. 

He can’t, because that would mean Peggy’s sacrifice – _his_ Peggy’s sacrifice – was for nothing. 

He runs through his theories well into the next day. The timeline. The Stones. The mission. It plays in his head in a thousand different scenarios, a thousand different ways. He needs to make sense of it. He’s missing something vital, something important. The Tesseract’s reappearance _means_ something.

#

“What the hell are we doing in Jersey, Steve?” Bucky grunts. “You know I _hate_ Jersey.”

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that at least five times since we filled up gas. Just park the car, Buck.” 

Steve looks down at the scratch of paper in his hand, confirming the address. The place is nothing more than an empty plot of farmland out in the middle of nowhere, but Howard had confirmed it. This is the place the Reality Stone had first been discovered a few months back, in New Jersey of all places. He shares Bucky’s instinctual aversion of the state, but it actually isn’t that bad. The farmland extends for a few hundred acres in every direction, but there’s no one working the field. They both get out of the car, thankful to stretch their legs, and Bucky listlessly waits beside the car, leaning heavily against the dust-covered bumper. 

Steve takes a walk around the place, squinting against the unblotted sun, staring at the endless horizon full of nothing except bundles of hay. Howard’s reports told him the red substance had been messing with the gravity of the place, making tractors lift off the road, making all the animals in the place skittish and crazy. There’s a barn a hundred yards away, the only thing that mars the landscape. Steve goes looking, while Bucky hollers his complaints in the background, still confused to high heaven about what they’re doing here. 

It’s a theory Steve’s testing. 

Nothing more than gut-instincts, but Steve has found his guts have very rarely led him wrong in the past. 

He walks around to find the entrance, about to pull the barndoors wide open, when suddenly his senses heighten. Steve abruptly realizes what’s about to happen, strategizes and recoils in one single breath. It’s too late. Someone jumps him from behind, legs wrapped around his waist like a trap, hauling him to the floor. Steve hits the ground hard, log-rolling forward to pitch the assailant off his back – surprised to find it’s a woman. Red hair, slender body, a real knockout with a killer right hook, he soon discovers. 

Steve’s not used to fighting women, at first so surprised by the discovery that he freezes, but then he can hear Peggy’s decisive voice in his head demanding he attack, gender be damned. Steve reacts to the next hit, grabbing the woman’s arm, twisting at the wrist, but she’s fast, sidestepping low and crouching, breaking free of his hold. He slams an elbow down, a move that would put a wrestler down cold, but the woman somehow ducks away and buckle his knee with razor sharp heels. She dodges backwards with a handspring like they’re dancing ballet, then throws a right cross that makes his skull sing for a moment.

Then she’s aiming her wrists, ejecting a small silver circular device from her advanced-tech gloves. He dodges her throw, watching an electroshock device fly through the air to stick a landing against the barn door. He recognizes the device, the same one Peggy used to put him down before running after the _Valkyrie._

“Freeze!” Bucky calls out, his handgun brandished. “It only takes one good hand to use this pistol, sweetheart,” he warns. “Don’t test me.”

The woman looks back, then loosely raises her hand, her fighting stance dropping in a blink. She smiles at Bucky, meant to be coy, but there's something behind it that is all painful. A blink of an eye later, Steve thinks he imagined it. She shakes her head a little to herself. “Well, this should be interesting.”

“Who are you?” Steve demands. 

“Relax,” she responds. “I’m a friendly.”

“Friends don’t attack,” Steve points out. 

“Well, depends on the friend, really,” she replies, entirely unconcerned.

Steve walks across to the barn door, confirming the futuristic-but-familiar electroshock device, ripping it off the wood. He glares up at the redhead, holding the device aloft. “Where’d you get this?”

“I didn’t want to attack,” she offers in return. “I was just trying to keep a low profile, and I was told no witnesses. I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“Clearly,” Bucky replies, stepping forward. “Answer the man’s question. Who are you?”

The redhead clears her throat, studiously ignoring Bucky's presence. “Don’t suppose I could talk to Rogers alone? I could explain it better to him.”

Steve’s undaunted by the fact that she knows his name; everyone in the world knows his name.

Bucky’s about to decline with a few choice words of profanity, but Steve stops him. “Bucky, wait in the car.”

Bucky looks at Steve like he’s lost his damn mind – and Steve might’ve agreed, if not for those gut instincts rearing its head again. He exchanges a hard look with Bucky, and reluctantly Bucky falls back, but not before tossing Steve the gun. Steve doesn’t like guns, never used them in the war, never had reason to, and he certainly isn’t planning to start now. He pockets the gun in the back of his waistband, giving a warning look to the redhead, cautioning her against any tricks. He’d been caught unaware the first time; she won’t be able to get the drop on him again.

The woman nods her head, taking the gesture in the way it was intended. 

“Inside,” Steve tells her. “Then you talk.”

The redhead walks in through the barn door, where Steve discovers exactly what he’d been searching for – the red substance, the Reality Stone, floating in the middle of the abandoned barn like its prancing on light.

“So, let’s cut to the chase,” the woman says. “Cap mentioned that she gave you the basic rundown already. My name is Natasha – Natasha Romanoff. I’m from the future.”

At this juncture in his life, he’s come to a point where he isn’t even phased by the declaration of time-traveling anymore. It’s the mention of ‘ _Cap’_ that throws him for a beat, before he realizes the woman is talking about Peggy, from the future. Captain Britain. 

“Where’s Peggy?” he asks, his priorities clear.

She looks away briefly, any joviality dropping like a false act. “We won against Thanos, thanks to those stones, but Peggy took some hits in the fight. She’s alive, but in a bad shape.”

“How bad?” he breathes out, sickened.

“We’re lucky she had your regenerative abilities,” Natasha replies. “It’s a pleasure, by the way, to see Captain America in action. I’ve only ever known you as the Director of Shield.”

For a moment, Steve’s still hesitant, but she’s said enough of the buzz words that his immediate suspicion is waning. He breathes out, hard. “Tell me about Peggy.”

She sighs. “She took a beating most others wouldn’t survive. Didn’t help she came back from the time heist badly injured, too. She’s in a coma. You – the older you – he’s keeping an eye on her. She’s in good hands. If there’s a way to save her, we’ll figure it out. Rest assured of that.”

He isn’t remotely assured. 

A thousand things collide in his head, but he needs facts first, needs to ground himself in reality. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “You came to return the stones?”

“Yeah, we had to. Something about damaging timelines if we didn’t. It’s really a head trip if you’re not more than just conversational in quantum physics.”

There’s a pause. “The Reality Stone was stolen from SSR’s London base,” he points out, suspiciously.

“You guys weren’t gonna have it for much longer anyway,” Natasha replies. “It jumps through space on its own, remember? It would’ve found its way back here within days. I just cut out the middleman.”

“And you returned the Tesseract to the ocean?”

“My first stop, yesterday.”

Something deep in his chest refuses to unclench. “What about my Peggy?”

Her eyes soften, just a bit. “What about her?”

“Tell me where to find—”

Natasha is already shaking her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not taking that as an answer.”

For a beat, she’s looking at Steve and maybe seeing someone else, the older man he grows to be, the one whose command she apparently follows. “What’s the saying you like to use? _Do as Peggy says_. You should respect her decision. You know that.”

Steve crushes the metallic device in his hand into dust. “Where is she?” he demands.

Natasha stares back. “She’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.”

#

From the moment he first set eyes on her, he could tell Natasha isn’t the type to break. The body language tells Steve she isn’t particularly threatened by him, despite knowing his full capabilities and strengths. She’s a self-possessed woman, not unlike Peggy, but different too, more audacious in her confidence, a more cynical charm in her smiles. Steve doesn’t know what to make of her, but one thing he recognizes – they could do this all day, and he wouldn’t break her.

Outside, Bucky is getting tired of the waiting game. A part of him wants to confess the entire truth to Bucky, knowing his oldest friend in the world can keep a secret like a vault, but Steve has never been confident enough to tell Bucky about his own future – one that was voided thanks to the future Peggy’s intervention. From what Steve had gathered, Bucky had almost lived through a fate infamously worse than death. 

He spends about an hour trying to get any further information from Natasha, but it’s like talking to a brick wall. “You’re not the worst interrogator I’ve ever met,” she tells him with a sardonic lift, “but you might be in the top three.”

“I shouldn’t have to resort to intimidation or violence. We’re on the same team.”

“Maybe on the same side, Rogers, but not the same team.”

He sighs tiredly, bowing his head a little.

“Look,” she says, the briefest glimpse of sympathy edging past her veneer. “I get it. I lost someone, too. He sacrificed himself, pitched himself off a cliff, just so we could get another one of these damn stones. I had to watch him die. I know how much you must want her back, because I’d give anything to have him back. But that would dishonor his sacrifice. That would make it meaningless, and we don’t have that right. We don’t have that privilege.”

He stares at her, assessing for a beat. “Did you love him?”

There’s a long pause, and then her voice almost breaks with a single word. “Yes.” 

She’s telling the truth. He can recognize his own pain when its staring right back at him.

“What are you going to do next?” he asks.

“This was my last stop,” she tells him, eyes clearing of emotions. She’s back to the act of carefree insolence. “I’ve returned all the other stones. Hopefully when I make it back to my time, it won’t be long before Peggy will be up and moving.” She pauses. “Would you like me to deliver a message to her?”

His throat closes off, thinking of too many things to say, and none of them good enough. He can’t imagine the age difference between Peggy and his future self, what that would do them, to their soulbond. The picture of him, old and tottering, trying to keep up with a Peggy still in her prime – it’s obscene. He could barely keep up with her for those few precious weeks they’d been together. 

“No,” he finally answers. “She knows exactly what I’d say.”

Natasha nods. “Then we done here?” 

He wants to resist, stubborn in his misery, but he knows he’ll never be satisfied with answers until he gets Peggy back. That isn’t in the books here, with Natasha. After a beat, he nods his head, just once, and she rises. The material on her clothes changes into some off-white uniform with red piping and gloves. A helmet emerges over her face, and Natasha reaches for some button on her wrist. She pauses, though, at the last second.

“You’re gonna wait for her, aren’t you?” she asks him.

He gives her a look, cool and assured. “We don’t have the luxury of deciding when we’re gonna fall for someone. She’s the love of my life. No point in me trying to fool myself or anyone else about it.”

She sighs. “You’ve got a long wait ahead of you, Rogers.”

Then, in a blink, she’s gone.

#

“Where is she?” Bucky asks, pushing off the car in annoyance.

“Gone,” Steve answers, briskly. 

“Gone? Where? You were stuck in a barn.”

Steve just tosses his keys to Bucky. “You drive.”

He gets in the passenger seat, trying to hedge around Bucky’s questions as best he can, not feeling in the mood to be sharing much of anything. It’s not that he doesn’t owe Bucky some answers into what’s happening, but Steve doesn’t have the wherewithal to deal with questions. The only thing he can manage is staring out the window, watching the passing scenery of acres of farmland stretching all the way to the horizon, broken only by fences and the occasional lone farmhouse. 

His chances at finding Peggy, at getting her back, keep slipping through his fingers – and for the first time since he’d heard that static over the airways and Peggy’s tearful voice, Steve realizes that maybe he won’t have a choice in the matter. Maybe this is just fate, and try as he might, try as stubbornly as he can, he won’t be able to change it. No matter how long he keeps fighting. Steve closes his eyes, resisting the effort to ride out the thought to its inevitable conclusion, but he can't. He can't resist, because he's been proven wrong too many times, that control is never a guarantee, that protecting the people he cares about is anything but a guarantee. Steve keeps squeezing his eyes shut, a bead of sweat breaking out at the edge of his neck, something that could easily be blamed on the summer heat, but the thread of anxiety runs recklessly through him, and maybe this is all the answers he’s ever gonna get? Maybe this is it. A message from the future that they won, that Peggy is alive but damaged, that he still has to wait a near eternity to see her – but one day, at least, he’ll see her. 

“C’mon, Steve,” Bucky says, trying to fill the silence, glancing over and over again at Steve’s profile in concern. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, man. You’re gonna spiral out and hit the ground.”

“Yeah,” Steve replies hoarsely, scrubbing his face. He clears his throat. “I’ll—I’m getting it together.”

Bucky isn’t buying that. “She wouldn’t want you living like this. She’d want you to move on.” He sighs heavily. “I never told you this before, but she made me promise to take care of you if anything ever happened to her. She made sure I promised this wouldn’t eat away at y—”

“Buck,” Steve says, warning. “I’m not in the mood.”

“What are you gonna do? Put a fist through my face? Go ahead. If I thought it’d make you feel any better, I’d volunteer for a beatdown right now. But that isn’t gonna make you feel better.”

“What would make me feel better?” Steve snaps.

Bucky looks lost for words. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But you gotta start putting one foot in front of the other. You’re like a ghost, man. After she was gone, you just coasted through the fighting for months. Now you’re coasting through the living.”

He’s right, of course. Steve’s been going through the motions on autopilot, but what else could he do when it hurts just to breathe? 

“Look, just make some decisions. Set your mind to something, Steve, anything other than that hole in your chest.”

“Like what?”

“Colonel Phillips left a message again,” Bucky says, voice low, almost scrambling. “He wants an answer on the Chief of New York position. You still haven’t gotten back to him about it.”

Becoming Chief of one of SSR’s offices is probably the first step towards him becoming the Director of this Shield organization everyone keeps telling him about. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that he’s going to join, but Steve isn’t eager to say yes, yet.

“You gotta start somewhere. I’ll be there to watch your back.”

“Yeah,” Steve says gruffly. “I’ll think about it.”

But, he supposes, there really isn’t much to think about. Any way he slices it, Thanos is coming. He needs to do everything in his power to stack the odds in Earth’s favor, make it so Peggy has a better chance of winning when she wakes up. Whenever she wakes up.

_“You’ve got a long wait ahead of you, Rogers.”_

Truer words have never been said.

#

**FIVE YEARS LATER…**

Steve stares down the muzzles of several dark steel rifles, knowing that if he moves or says anything unfortunate, entire magazine clips will empty in seconds. He isn’t particularly worried about himself; it’s just that his entire team isn’t quite as bulletproof as him, even Buck, who has his own advances. The pack of Blood Brothers, a group of seven men all currently training their guns on Steve, aren’t the type to miss their mark, but for the moment Steve is thankful he’s the only one they’re aiming at.

“Anyone else have any other bright ideas?” Jack Thompson asks, exasperated, from the outer perimeter. He’d been adamantly against this entire raid from the start and had been loud and explicit about it. Thankfully, Steve is still the Chief in charge, despite several attempts to dismantle his position, which made ignoring Jack on the occasions he got a little too full of himself that much easier to deal with. “Boss, you want us to take ‘em out?”

“Not yet,” Steve replies. The group of Blood Brothers don’t budge as the SSR men close ranks around them, two at each side; Steve could see sweat breaking out over them all. “You can’t win this one, gentlemen. Lower the guns, and you’ll walk.”

“You’ll let us go?” one of the Brothers returns, incredulously.

“No,” Steve answers. “I said you’ll _walk_. You refuse to surrender, then your ability to do that pretty much goes out the window.”

The Blood Brother in charge shakes his head. “We can’t surrender. They’ll kill us all if we’re caught.”

“We can protect you,” Steve says.

The leader just stares at him, then spits. “Weak assurances. You may have once been the great Captain America, but even you couldn’t protect your soulbond. What good can you do for us, then?”

From the back, Daniel Sousa winces. “Bad idea, bringing that up.”

Steve takes a flying leap at the man, crushing him into the wall behind him. All hell breaks loose as a firefight breaks out. Steve piledrives another Blood Brother into ground, and the next few minutes are spent dodging bullets and slamming soviet trained men into nearby flat surfaces. From some nearby rooftop, Bucky is planted on the ground, sniper shots taking out one man at a time until Steve is surrounded by a litter of fallen enemies. 

But this is beginning to feel too much like déjà vu, the amount of times it keeps happening.

After things had gone sideways in that first year after the war, when Howard had nearly been thrown into jail because of false accusations of treason for selling weapons to enemies of the United States, Steve had agreed to come back into the fold of the SSR. If only because the people placed in charge of the New York HQ after he initially refused the position were looking in all the wrong directions. Steve hadn’t officially taken over until the former chief, a man named Dooley, had died with a bomb strapped to his chest. 

Four years after that, there’s renewed talk of dismantling the SSR entirely because their congressional funds have dried up in the post-war economy. Phillips is already thinking about branching out further, forming a clandestine organization that works more covertly to take down threats against the democratic world. Phillips is still tossing around ideas, hasn’t even named the thing yet, but Steve isn’t going to offer up the moniker of “Shield” because it feels vaguely self-aggrandizing. Still, he knows it’s coming, and he knows one day he’s gonna be tapped as Director, probably after Phillips ultimately makes the final move into retirement that he’s been threatening about for years.

Steve hates that so much of his life is already laid down at his feet, but there’s been too much of this lately, especially after the war. First, HYRDA. Then, Leviathan. Now it’s some other organization going by another outlandish name – this time, the Blood Brothers, another guerilla group hellbent on proving the supremacy of the white race. It never ends. 

As he picks his way across the auto-garage, the dirt-floor factory smelling of sweat and blood, he lets his men apprehend and take care of the fallen enemies. He bends a knee to pick up the dropped notebook on the ground, the same notebook that he’d chased halfway across the city looking for. Inside, he finds a coded message of some sort, something that’ll need to be decrypted and analyzed, and slips it quietly into his pocket. 

If rumors are true, the book held the Russian equivalent of the Super Soldier Serum. He can’t let this fall into anyone else’s hands.

Steve decides he’ll handle all the interrogations back at headquarters in the morning, when the Blood Brothers have had all night to sweat it out. Steve slips off into the darkness, putting Bucky in charge of the scene, ignoring the bale of pollution rising from the eastern river where the factories spew out fumes from thick chimneys. The air reeks in this part of the city. He grew up not too far from here, which was by no means a spotless city back then, but it’s gotten worse somehow. When he was little, he dreamt about cleaning up the place, but despite all his considerable efforts to the contrary, it feels like the world is just getting dirtier. 

His first year as Chief, when Leviathan started showing up, he’d thought he was dealing with the inevitable fallout and power vacuum of a post-HYDRA world, but now he realizes it’s more than that. There will always be influential men, _evil_ men, men who thought they could get away with anything just because they had some measure of power. Steve will never admit this to anyone, but he’s getting tired of cleaning up all their messes. Except he knows someone has to deal with them, and it isn’t like he’d know what to do with himself if he stopped.

Still, there are days when it isn’t so bad, when he feels like he’s making some modicum of difference. His quiet one-bedroom apartment is in one of the seedier parts of Brooklyn, only because he knew he could make a difference simply by living there. True to expectations, the local street gangs and hood rats stopped making such a mess of the place when they found out Captain America – or _former_ Captain America – was living in the vicinity. A few obvious skirmishes broke out at the beginning, but the neighborhood is quieter now, safer, without much of the riffraff that had flooded the place with drugs and prostitution beforehand. He’s helped sober up at least a dozen former junkies and gang members in the last year alone, even got his picture snapped helping a former working girl find some new housing (which had been a banner day in the press; he is _still_ dealing with the fallout of that). But it’s the little victories that mean something to Steve, almost more than the never-ending SSR battles.

The moment he goes through his front door, though, Steve knows something is wrong. He schools his face into neutral boredom, pushing through his apartment leisurely, knowing it isn’t some punk-nosed kid stupid enough to break into his apartment. The notebook in his jacket pocket feels like a bullseye as Steve starts at the entrance and works his way through; the living room sits undisturbed, the kitchen only offers him a dim view of the alleyway out back, the bedroom and bathroom are empty too. The place is vacant, despite his instincts telling him there’s someone nearby. 

Suddenly, he hears a very loud clang, not at all the type of noise a person sneaking around would likely make. He returns to the living room, where he freezes as he spots something – a familiar cylinder disk – lying on the floor. When he picks it up and turns it over, he finds it painted in red, white and blue, the recognizable _Captain America_ shield he hasn’t seen in over five years. 

A nearby groan grabs his attention, and Steve whirls around, finding a figure on the floor that hadn’t been there before, blood pouring from a headwound, coughing up nastily while kneeling on all fours like a broken doll. Steve nearly convinces himself that this isn’t real—he isn’t seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. 

But then Peggy lifts her head, eyes locking with his, and he knows it’s real.

He rushes to her side as she loses consciousness. It takes a blinding second to dawn on him, even as he reaches her, brushing back familiar locks of hair, the strands smooth and silky straight rather than the stylized curls she usually wore. Her face is badly bruised, a discoloration of blue and black all across the right side of her face. He can tell her eye socket is blown, a collection of fluids just below her eye, swollen and red. He lifts and carefully carries her prone form to the sofa, not quite believing it, not having reached hope yet in the frenzy. 

The last time he felt like this, he’d been holding Peggy’s bloody body too, carrying the weight of her down the last eight hundred feet to the base of the Tatras mountains. It doesn’t make any sense, the way his soulbond works, and how he knows, _knows_ exactly what’s hurting her just by looking, that the link is real and tangible, because he’s seen it, lived it, experienced it in quantifiable ways. But he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone else, especially not this stubborn, enraging feeling that exists anytime Peggy is hurt, but this is _Peggy_. As sure as he is breathing, this is Peggy.

First thing’s first, her injuries are bad. There’s an open wound on her head that’s gushing blood, another one below her third rib. His hands come back slippery with blood, and he has to force himself not to crush her to him, press his skin to hers in vain assurances that she’s here, she’s alive – he has to address her injuries first. 

A hospital is out of the question, at least until he knows who or what put her in this state. Her identity is another concern. 

He needs to know how badly she’s injured. Removing her clothes almost seems too intimate, especially since she’s unconscious, but he has to assess and triage the best he can. He pulls off her red gloves first, tugging them free. She’s wearing the same type of suit that had allowed for time-traveling before, the quantum suit, something easily unzipped. He doesn’t know if it’s malfunctioning again, or what – but he strips it off gingerly, holding his breath, praying to a god he stopped talking to years back. Underneath, he finds her in a type of brassiere and undergarment he’s never seen before, but he doesn’t focus on that.

After he assesses a laundry list of injuries, he covers her up with a blanket. Broken ribs. At least two fractured bones on her right leg. Depressed skull contusion with a likely concussion. A thousand and one abrasions. He has no idea what or who could have done this to her, but he’s seen enough to know what he has to do. 

His blood, he realizes. She needs his blood. 

They still share the same blood type; the same procedure already saved her life once before. He’s seen the medics perform transfusions enough times in the field that he knows how to do it; he still even keeps a medical bag full of supplies for evenings when he comes back from the office with injuries that he doesn’t want the docs to prod him over. He taps her arm after a few tries, then his own, watching the blood surge down the tube from his veins into hers. He sits there quietly, maddeningly quiet, going over questions and doubts as the transfusion takes its slow effect. He knows he needs to be patient, but it’s hard to manage.

Over the next few hours, he gives her more pints than he probably should, to the point where he’s almost dizzy, _almost,_ but her body soaks up the blood like a sponge. He starts to notice the wounds on her head and body closing up. The left eye lessens in swelling, fading to a dark blue bruise. 

After the transfusion, he decides to slip on an old shirt of his over her head, something so big it swamps her down to the knees. The movement drives her to stir awake briefly. 

“St—Steve?” she whispers, faintly. “You’re here? I-I made it?”

“I’m here, Peg,” he breathes back, reverent. “I’m here, you’re all right.”

She passes out again.

#

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but at some point, he must have because when he wakes, she’s gone. A moment of blind panic surges through him because the terror of this entire thing being a dream – some mix of a nightmare and a dream – overtakes him. Except there’s evidence of her injuries all around him: her ruined quantum suit, a mound of soiled bandages, a collection of antiseptics and used syringes piled on the side table.

He hears water running in the bathroom, the door barely ajar. He pushes it open gently to find her braced against the sink, the water swirling pink down the drain. She’s washed her face, but not much else, standing there in his oversized t-shirt, hair matted to the sides of her face, looking like death warmed over. 

She’s still one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen.

“Peggy,” he breathes out.

She lifts her head. “Hello, Steve,” she returns, trying to control her voice. Her lower lip trembles. “I can’t believe I made it back.”

She sounds just as surprised as he is.

Before he can even think it, before he’s even made the conscious decision, he’s shifted toward her in a blink, wrapping her up in his arms reverently. A sob breaks out of her as she melts against him, and Steve isn’t dried-eyed either, because holding her against him is proof enough that she isn’t a dream, isn’t some mirage or trick that will vanish as soon as he blinks. She feels warm, almost feverishly so, but the material of her shirt isn’t enough to cover up the fact that she’s trembling. For a moment, he just breathes in her scent, feeling her through the soulbond as a myriad of emotions flood them both. Grief, disbelief, alarm, exhaustion – but above it all, joy. They stay like that for a long, long time.

“What happened?” he eventually asks, pulling back to brush hair out of her face. “Was it Thanos?”

She shakes her head. “Unfortunately, Thanos isn’t the only threat the Avengers faced. More come after him.”

“Nobody worse, though, right?” he ventures.

At first Peggy just looks away, saying nothing. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells him. “The threat was dealt with. We won – again.”

The bleak way she says it gives him the idea that it wasn’t without a cost. She’s obviously been through the ringer; her injuries wouldn’t have happened without a hell of a beating. For a moment, Steve wants to press more, but all he’s really focused on is that he has her back again – and the why’s and wherefores can wait.

“You came back,” he says, softly.

She looks up at him, smiling briefly, pained, a sheen of unshed tears in her eyes. “I had a ticket home. I guess I just had to wait for the right moment to cash it.”

He knows there’s more to it. In the state that she arrived in, he knows there _has_ to be. There are faint lines around her eyes, slender but impressionable, on her face. She’s a few years older than the Peggy he knew, even the Peggy that had travelled from the future the last time. His Peggy – if he understands everything correctly – must still be lying frozen down in the ice somewhere. The thought makes him step back marginally, taking in a deep pained breath, the exhale excruciating. For her part, Peggy doesn’t notice – or doesn’t react to it. She looks in a fragile state, both physically and emotionally, and he just watches her, unsure of what to do next. 

The clarifications can wait, he decides. He’s almost scared of what answers he’ll find.

“How do you feel?” he asks, instead.

“Better than I should, all things considered,” she answers, then nods towards the bathtub. “I need to clean up.”

He nods, immediately starting to get a warm bath going – one of the few blessed luxuries he’d gone out of his way to ensure worked well in his rented apartment. When he turns back, she’s still leaning heavily against the sink, unmoving. Tired. Pale as a ghost, despite having taken more blood from him than should have been humanly feasible to give. 

He clears his throat. “Do you—do you need some help?”

Briefly hesitating, she nods. It isn’t as if he hasn’t already seen her naked, both in sexual situations and outside of it, but it’s different now. When he steps up to help pull her shirt off again, there’s a sheen of perspiration coating her skin. There are multiple stains of blood scattered across her back, but all of the wounds have mercifully closed. In fact, all of the scars and scrapes she had suffered appear gone. She attempts to unhook her brassier, but her muscles are still stiff.

“Can you?” she asks, quietly. 

He scrambles to unclasp her new-fangled bra, managing it after a few tries, and Steve looks away as she slips out of it. She manages to slither out of the rest of her undergarments without further assistance, letting the material fall down her legs. He still has his eyes modestly turned away when she starts to climb into the tub, but a sharp inhale has him turning back, catching her wincing in pain at the lip of the tub. He snaps his gaze away again.

“Oh, for god’s sakes, Steve,” she snaps. “You’ve seen all of this before more than enough times.”

“I don’t know about _more than enough_ ,” Steve returns. “But I take your point.”

He helps her into the tub gingerly. Neither of them speaks as he takes a nearby tattered cloth and dips it into the water, wiping off the blood on her back. He wants to ask questions, desperate to find the answers, but at the same time he can’t manage the words.

Then Peggy quietly breaks out into a soft sob, overcome with emotion, shoulders shaking against the futile effort of control, and he doesn’t care about any conversations. He doesn’t give a damn about getting wet either, climbing into the tub, settling down behind her, legs awkwardly folded underneath him. She leans back heavily into his arms, her sobs intensifying – for what or who, he can only imagine, but he doesn’t need the details yet to know she’s suffered a great loss. He also knows it makes him a right bastard that he’s so thankful to have her back, despite her obvious grief.

“Shh,” he tells her, soothingly. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

#

She falls asleep, taking over a surprisingly small portion on his bed, and the urge to join her is so severe Steve has to actively talk himself out of it. He goes about cleaning up the soiled bandages and clothes. He doesn’t know what to do with her quantum suit, so he eventually settles on putting it safely inside a bag in his closet with the fastener zipped up. He has Peggy’s old clothes, too, still saved in one of his old suitcases underneath the bed; he’d had her clothes neatly folded in his drawers for the longest time, but the sight of seeing it day-after-day for years had grown too much for him. Steve fetches the suitcase out, doing his best not to wake her as he jostles under the bed, but it’d probably take a parade marching through his bedroom to get her to stir. He sets the clothing out on the nightstand and closes the bedroom door, leaving her to rest, but he can’t stop checking up on her every few minutes, still convinced she’s going to disappear. 

By mid-morning, he belatedly remembers that he has work and calls into the office, getting Bucky on the phone when the girls put him through. _“I was about to send out a search party,”_ Bucky says, only half joking.

“I’m taking the day off.”

There’s a pause, then Bucky comes back on sounding incredulous. _“The last time you took a day off, you were an asthmatic sophomore with two broken ribs.”_

“Personal day, Buck,” Steve just says. “Can you handle things or not?”

Bucky pauses again on the other end. _“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”_

Steve hangs up. He has more pressing concerns, but he knows better than to think Bucky’s curiosity isn’t going to come back as a problem later. He isn’t even sure what to say, probably because he doesn’t know what Peggy’s reappearance means. In all his daydreams, in all his fantasies, he’s never once anticipated their reunion going down quite like this. He makes breakfast, then lunch, but she sleeps through both meals, clearly needing the rest. She sleeps. He waits. She sleeps some more, so he waits some more.

He gets a knock at the door around supper time, and even before looking he knows who it is. Bucky is at the door when Steve peeks through the peephole, fidgeting in annoyance with his left arm, a type of artificial limb prototype that Howard had insisted on trying out; this is Bucky’s dozenth in so many years. 

Steve pulls open the door, and Bucky doesn’t bother waiting for an invitation before barging in. “So, you gonna tell me or—”

“Shh,” Steve chides, tossing an anxious look at the bedroom door. “Not so loud.”

Bucky stops in his tracks like he’s a deer caught in headlights. Bucky looks around at the half-forgotten plates of food, noticing two untouched meals. Steve regrets setting out the candles now. “You—you got a girl here?” he sounds so shocked, so amazed, it’d almost be amusing any other day, except Steve has never really found much hilarity in the ribbing he gets for his lack of love life. “When you said you were taking a personal day, I just assumed that meant you were preparing for WWIII.”

Steve glares back. “It’s not like that.”

Bucky lifts an eyebrow at him, waiting for the explanation, and Steve is at a loss. He wants to tell him about Peggy, he really does, but the explanation will necessitate a cover for her return, and Steve hasn’t come up with that yet. Bucky still doesn’t know about time-travel, and he never will if Steve can manage it. The foreknowledge of the future has already messed with Steve’s head enough for two lifetimes; he doesn’t want to burden anyone else with it.

“You're right, Buck. I got a girl here, so you can understand why I don't want any extra company around.”

Bucky looks genuinely confused more than anything. “You... uh, who's the girl?”

“No one you know," he lies. “Someone I met recently.”

Bucky stares. “Someone you just met? You, Steve Rogers, the king of celibacy, took home a girl you just met?”

“Look, it happened very quickly, and I—”

“Where'd you meet?”

“What?”

“Where did you meet?” Bucky asks, suspiciously.

Steve scrambles for an answer. “The store. I was trying to buy some... some bananas. She wanted a banana, too.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t say anything for a beat, eyes roaming the room until it lands on an object that Steve had forgotten was there. “Steve, is that your shield?” 

_Damn._

Steve should really be better at lying, at this point. “Yeah, about that—”

Bucky goes through the bedroom door before Steve thinks to stop him. On the other side, Peggy is still passed out, blissfully unaware that her secret is so easily discovered in a manner that would earn him a lecture or two on the _basic_ principles of espionage. 

“Oh my god,” Bucky breathes, staring. “Where did she—how did she—why didn’t you _tell me_?” 

“Because I don’t know how to explain it myself. She’d showed up last night, wounded. I haven’t had a lot of time to process it.”

Bucky stands there staring, mouth agape, then nods. He steps back from the door, closing it briefly only to crack it open again almost immediately, as if to double-check his findings. He finally closes the door with a soft shut and expels a harsh breath.

“Jesus,” he mutters.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “Look, I need a few days of cover at work—”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it. I’m already interrogating the Blood Brothers.” 

Steve had nearly forgotten about them. “Don’t tell anyone about this, Buck.”

“Who’d I tell? No one would believe me, anyway.”

A tea kettle whistling pulls them out of the conversation, back to the kitchen. Steve has been trying to make her tea all day, but there’s a row of cups left unsipped lining up on the counter now, all gone cold. As he pulls the kettle off the stove, he rests back against the kitchen counter and scrubs a hand across his face.

“Jesus,” Bucky says again, still stunned.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees.

There's a pause, then incredulously, “A _banana_?”

“I panicked, all right!”

#

Bucky leaves shortly thereafter, and Steve is left alone again with his thoughts, running through the gambit of worst-case scenarios until he can’t stand it anymore. He eats food because his stomach growls so loudly he fears it’ll wake up Peggy. He goes through the Blood Brother notebook for a short period of time, lifting to his feet and reading the gibberish as he paces, trying to find a cipher code. It proves useless, so Steve tosses it back into the bottom of a drawer to deal with at another time.

He reads the newspaper halfheartedly, taking out a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice with him, before settling at her bedside. She’s passed out cold, but every so often she mutters something in her sleep, a whimper or a soft cry that cuts him up like a thousand razor blades. She usually settles back down almost immediately, so he sits at her bedside, stretching out his legs every once in a while, waiting for her to wake. 

The day passes by, and then, finally, _finally_ , her eyes open at some point. Steve doesn’t immediately notice it until he looks up from his reading material to find her staring at him, her gaze so intent, a sheen of tears welling in her eyes. He just stares back at her achingly familiar brown eyes, the sharp nose, the cheekbones and lips so breathtakingly beautiful that he has to remind himself to breathe. 

“Steve, you—” her voice is quiet, barely a whisper, and she tries to sit up. Steve moves to help her sit up, and it isn’t until they’ve managed it that either of them finds the courage to exchange anything much more than looks. “How long was I out?”

“Two days,” he tells her. “How do you feel?”

She closes her eyes, tired, but she answers, “Better.”

He isn’t going to call her out on the lie. He gives her some water, which she gulps down eagerly, but she wrinkles her nose in disgust when he presents her with a plate of food. “You need to eat,” he insists. He knows her metabolism is nearly as fast as his. “Something, anything.”

She reluctantly nibbles on a piece of toast, mostly to placate him. 

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. “You must be going mad, waiting. You must have so many questions.”

“I’m just glad you’re back.”

She manages a small smile. “Me, too.”

They stare at each other again, and Steve gets the sense she’s soaking up the sight of him just as much as he’s soaking up the view of her. He wonders how long it’s been for her, in the future. Probably more than the five years it’s been for him. 

“I can’t tell you much,” she eventually says, miserably. “I still have to keep plenty of secrets to maintain the timeline. I hope you understand that.”

He does, actually. It took him years to come to terms with it, with having secrets kept from him, because the foreknowledge that he _did_ have has done enough of a number on him. He gets why it can be so dangerous to know about the future.

“What can you tell me?” he asks. “How long were you in the future?”

She licks her lips. “Eighteen years total,” she tells him. “It’s been six since Thanos.”

That gives him a vague idea of what she could have gone through, since she last saw him. Something wars at him, bubbling up to the surface almost despite himself. He’s been thinking about this a lot, about why she’d wait to find him, why she’d come now – who she could have lost that would cause her to fling herself back to the past. The grief he’d witnessed the night before.

“Your Steve died, didn’t he?” he asks.

Her eyes squeeze shut, and she doesn’t respond, but her tears are more than enough of an answer. Even if he hadn’t had the benefit of their soulbond to feel out her emotions, the grief is too strong, too plainly written across her face. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, reaching forward to grab her hand. 

She squeezes back tightly, lips trembling as she says, “It’s why I was in such a shape when I came here. When he—he _died_ , my regenerative abilities went away. The soulbond had been cut.”

He curses with a sharp exhale, pulling her to him as she collapses into a heap, taking comfort and needing it at the same time. For a moment, he holds her and tries to imagine what she’d gone through – losing her Steve, fighting some great unknown enemy, taking a beating without the super soldier regenerative abilities. He feels like he’s suffocating from the thought.

“After the fight,” she tells him, sniffling, “I looked around and knew – if I didn’t come back here, I was dead. A part of me wanted to let it happen, but he made me promise, before he died, he made me promise to come back to you. He saved a Pym Particle just for this.”

It’s good to know he’d continue to watch out for her, even after he’s dead.

She pulls back, needing to separate herself from the memory. “Natasha told me she ran into you, when she was returning the stones.”

“Yeah, she was… unhelpful about what happened to you.”

Peggy pulls a face, rather regretful but amused, entirely too adorable under the circumstances. “You’ll have to forgive her, she’s a trained spy. You wouldn’t have been able to pry anything out of her even under the threat of torture.”

“She mentioned that,” Steve offers, flatly.

“What about you?” 

“What about me?” 

“How have you—” She trails off when she must realize he isn't staring at her eyes any longer; his gaze is caught focused on her lips, because he suddenly, _intensely_ , became aware of just how close they are. She clears her throat, and he snaps his eyes up, a careful and polite minuet falling between them as he pulls back. “What have you been doing?”

He manages to refocus with a deep breath. “I figured you’d know that, coming from the future.”

“It’s not like that,” Peggy returns. “Steve never told me specifics about his past, only generalities. I want to know from you.”

He imagines the future Steve had as much desire to explain his life – a life without her – as Steve felt in that very moment. “I never stopped looking for you, Peg.” 

Peggy flinches, hard. “ _Oh, Steve_.”

He couldn’t stop, despite knowing better. He’s spent most of his days working at the SSR, but that’s never prevented him – or Howard, for that matter – from using considerable resources to scour the Artic. They’ve never found anything, of course, and Steve largely suspects they never will. That hasn’t stopped them from trying.

“You can’t,” she tells him. “She wouldn’t want you to, and you know that.”

He’s heard these same words from a dozen and one people, over a thousand and one times. It’s never meant anything close as to hearing her say it. “I know,” he says to her. “But she’s out there somewhere—”

“The first face she’ll see,” she tells him, promising, “will be yours. In the proper time. In the way it’s supposed to happen, decades from now. You mustn’t rush this, Steve. You can’t.”

They stare at each other, both having lost their own versions of each other, but knowing fate had a hand yet to play in everything else. That’s when he puts a name to it, the sense of longing giving him too much insight into all the ways this could play out. They could dance the same dance of avoidance they’d done for the first year of their courtship, ignoring or denying the connection between them, the bond that went right down to his soul. They could do it all over again, but Steve’s on the other side of five years already, and this feeling of estrangement and heartache and loss is already too much. He can’t imagine the idea of another handful of decades.

This is his Peggy, but it isn’t.

This is the love of his life, but it isn’t.

This could be the thing that’ll make him happy, if he lets himself.

Already, he feels, like that battle is lost.

#

She’s quicker to recover after that, spending the rest of the night in bed and waking fresh in the morning. He sleeps in the chair at her bedside over her protests, knowing that while he wants nothing more than to curl up in her arms, it isn’t quite the right thing to do yet – not yet. Grief and joy mix together, and he doesn’t – he can’t imagine letting her go, any version of her now that he has her, but there are thorny issues between them that he can’t ignore either. She isn’t the same Peggy as the one he’d said goodbye to on the Valkyrie, at least not yet. She isn’t the same Peggy, but in the morning when she joins him for breakfast wearing an old dress of hers, looking so much like a vision out of his memories, he has to excuse himself to the other room to collect himself for a long moment. 

The soulbond sings its song, too, drawing them to each other. Every brush of her fingers, every near touch, every glance between them – an old half-elapsed charge springs to life, as if to say he’s being a fool for believing she’s anything but _his_.

By mid-afternoon the next day, he gets a call from Bucky. “Sorry to interrupt… whatever is going on there,” he clears his throat, “but I gotta call you in. One of the Blood Brothers started talking. They’re moving on formulating a Super-Soldier Serum of their own, Steve. I don’t have to tell you how important that is to stop.”

He closes his eyes, nods once, glancing back at Peggy with remorse. “I’ll be in shortly.”

He hangs up, knowing Peggy has heard enough. “The Super-Soldier Serum?” she asks.

He pulls out the notebook from the other night and tells her everything he knows. “It’s encrypted,” he says at the end, “but maybe you’ll have a better handle at cracking it than me. I know you used to work as a code-breaker at the beginning of the war.”

She nods, fingers already parting the spine of the notebook, running through the pages. “I’ll keep busy. You go. And tell Barnes—” she stops, smiling, “tell Bucky I said _hello_.”

He’d already informed her about Bucky’s drop-by. “I will.”

He grabs his keys, then stares at her, not sure how to say goodbye. His gut instincts scream at him to kiss her, but that’s just his baser predispositions getting carried away with itself. All they’ve done is hold each other in moments of true vulnerability, and this – saying goodbye as he heads off to work – isn’t one of those, rather closer to a moment of domesticity than anything else. They’ve never been one for those.

She smiles, seeing his hesitation, and makes the decision for him. She presses a small kiss to the corner of his lips, and the moment lingers, alit with promise, his skin tingling where she touched it all too briefly. 

“I’ll see you when you get home,” she tells him.

“Promise?” he manages, jokingly – mostly.

He’s still not a hundred percent sure he isn’t dreaming this all up.

“Promise,” she returns, smiling.

#

His concentration at work is shot. Still, the Blood Brothers are a problem, and the snitch in the group is paranoid, insisting an exchange is about to go down for a vital ingredient in their Super Soldier Serum. They suit up for another raid, but before they head out, Bucky pulls Steve aside.

“Everything okay?” Bucky asks, meaningfully. 

He doesn’t say Peggy’s name, but he doesn’t have to. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve manages. “We’re still figuring things out, but it’s…” he exhales out, sharply. “it’s good.”

Bucky slowly grins. “Yeah, I bet it is.”

The innuendo-laced tone is hard to miss. Steve rolls his eyes, pulling away, and then they’re loading into cars. The moment turns sober as Bucky drives out, as the weight of their mission takes priority. Steve knows that Bucky has his own issues when it comes to the Super Soldier Serum. While not quite to Steve’s level, whatever was done to him by HYDRA had changed Bucky, changed him in a way that had taken years to see. It was the fate and folly of his work at the SSR that had brought the full extent of it to light, when they’d been forced to work alongside Zola himself two years back.

 _“Enhanced regenerative abilities, advanced physiology, durability and strength,”_ Zola had told them. _“You should be thanking me, Agent Barnes. I have made you exceptional.”_

It had taken four guards to pull Bucky back from the resulting attack. Steve had been the one to finally hold him steady, not that he hadn’t wanted to see Zola ripped apart either.

The repeated attempts to recreate the Super Soldier Serum is perhaps inevitable in their tradecraft, but Steve hopes they can somehow put the genie back in the bottle. He’s stopped cooperating with the government years back, stopped giving them blood, stopped accommodating the physicals. He’d signed up to be a patriot in the war, an all-too-eager subject in Erskine’s experiments, but it had taken him far too long to see the consequences of what his blood could do to greedy men in charge.

And, now, of course, with Peggy reappearing, he’s presented with a whole new host of complications. 

Everyone knows about their soulbond. For months after her fateful descent into the Artic, Steve had been hounded by news reporters craving soundbites on the tragic love story. _Captain America’s Soulbond Dies in Raid Against Red Skull._ Some had painted her as nothing more than an extension of Steve’s legacy. There was even an insipid radio series that portrayed Peggy as a myopic damsel-in-distress that had been kidnapped and killed by Red Skull in his final moments of villainy. Others took a harder look. The speculations ran wild, and some weren’t too far off in their mark on the consequences of their soulbond. There had been a few minor London papers that went on to speculate that she might have been a capable force all on her own, a figure the world had overlooked. When Steve gave his inevitable post-war interviews, it had been to these London papers exclusively.

He doubts she’d be overlooked now, especially by men eager to get their hands on any version of the Super-Soldier Serum.

All in all, though, the raid is a moot point. By the time they arrive, the exchange has already happened. A pair of guards have been shot and killed, and a bio-solution called Axio has been stolen by contingents in the Blood Brother organization.

Steve and Bucky exchange a dark wrought-filled look with each other, full of warning.

#

He returns back home later than he likes, having dealt with the consequences of a botched operation, but any apology on his lips dies an early death as he walks through the door to find a trashed apartment. His furniture is destroyed, walls dented in an obvious fallout of a recent fight, and panic seizes him as he searches the place for Peggy.

“I’m all right, Steve,” she appears in the bedroom doorway, looking like she’s been in a tussle. “We had unexpected company.”

He goes through the bedroom door to find a dead man on the floor. His hand reveals the same tattoo as all the other Blood Brothers: a cross outlined in red and black. 

“He was after this,” Peggy tells him, handing him the notebook. “I’ve cracked the code and only just started translating. They have a formula remarkably similar to Erskine’s, or at least what I knew of it. There’s a few things wrong, but from what I’ve read thus far, they’re dangerously close to working out something feasible.”

He doesn’t care about any of that. He starts searching Peggy for injuries, and she’s taken aback at first, but then just submits to his inspection obligingly, if reluctantly. He ignores the roll of her eyes, checking her face, lifting up her hair to make sure her headwound hadn’t somehow reopened, checking her ribs, examining as much of her as possible to make sure she hasn’t somehow injured herself again.

“I’m fine, Steve, really,” she implores, gently, sensing his panic. She stills his hands in hers. “I can handle one lone assassin.”

“I just got you back,” he breathes out thickly. 

In that moment, so quick and sharp like a knife cutting through his sternum, he realizes that if he had lost her after only a few days, it would have _killed_ him. 

“It’s going to take more than this to take me away from you,” Peggy soothes, the pads of her thumbs running soft circles over his hands. “I’m not going anywhere, my darling.”

The affectionate nickname nearly undoes him, because it’s been too long since he’s heard those words in that tone. 

He forces himself to regroup. “We have to get out of here. It’s not secure anymore.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “Somehow I would think it would take more than just one attack to make Captain America leave his home.”

“I’m not Captain America anymore, and it’s not me that I’m worried about.”

“What—what do you mean you’re not Captain America anymore?” she sounds incredulous, outraged. “Steve, tell me that’s not—”

“Not now,” he cuts in, though he’s a little surprised himself that she doesn’t already know this. He assumed his future counterpart had given up the mantle the same time he did, but her shock belies something else entirely. “We have to find someplace safe to lay low, at least for tonight.”

“You have some place in mind?”

He does. 

#

The safehouse is a dive, but in his defense, they use it for SSR official business and that usually means they’re stashing some low life there. He never expected he’d need to use it himself, but it works out in a pinch. The room is spacious but dirty, small windows shuttered up with wood-panels, a pair of cots at the side, one reserved for the protectee, the other usually for the man watching over them. Peggy swipes a finger across the front table, leaving a pattern behind in the dust, and her upturned nose tells him everything she thinks about the place. 

It’s hardly how he wants to spend the night with her, but then again, he hasn’t afforded himself much opportunity to go down that line of thinking because it’s a myriad of distractions and pitfalls. 

It occurs to Steve, too late and not without anguish, to wonder if this is the world’s way of warning him from getting too comfortable, from getting his hopes up too high that him and Peggy will ever have it easy, will ever be able to just rest and enjoy themselves no matter how much they’ve sacrificed to keep the world safe. And if he’s being honest with himself, he’s part of the problem. He's been holding himself back a little because of the conflicting feelings over the Peggy in front of him and the one he knows is slumbering in the ice, but he realizes he can’t waste another opportunity. 

_I’ve made my decision, Steve,_ she’d written _. Now you have to make yours. I pray it’ll be one to move towards the light._

“Tell me more about the Blood Brothers,” Peggy says. “Other than their outlandish name, I don’t know a thing about them.”

“I suppose that’s a good thing, meaning they’re unlikely to be a long-term threat.”

“Not necessarily,” Peggy replies, sighing. “They could go underground, proving better at discretion than other more obvious threats.”

He scrubs a hand across his face, nodding. “I suppose.”

He tells her about the operation he stumbled upon six months back, the one that brought to light this emerging collection of Soviet white supremacists. She listens intently, quietly, so in line with how he remembered her during all those underground bunker debriefings that he has to pause in between just to admire the view.

“What?” she asks, when she catches him staring.

He just shakes his head, and smiles. “Nothing, just looking.”

“At what?”

“You,” he tells her, shameless.

Her cheeks flame red, and she glances away.

He’s not sure what they’re doing, but it’s a bit like they’ve fallen back to flirting like they used to before they’d _touched_ and cemented their soulbond. Steve understands that she’s been through a lot – so has he – but the fact that they’ve been given this chance, this unimaginable second chance, and he still can’t work up the nerve to kiss her is ridiculous. Well, that isn’t precisely true. He _can_ work up the nerve to kiss her. He just doesn’t want to rush this, not even if his entire body is flooded with anticipation. Peggy deserves to move at the pace she needs, and he’s determined to let her make the first move. He _clearly_ remembers she’s never had a problem with that in the past. Hopefully it just doesn’t take as long as the last time.

He’ll wait, though. He’ll wait for as long as she needs.

She insists on staying up to finish decrypting the book, and he wants to stay up with her, feeling like a part of him is keyed up with too much energy and no way to disburse it. Except the truth is his body is finally crashing after several days of little sleep and a blood transfusion that had probably taken an ill-advised amount of blood away from him. Even his body has limits when it comes to exhaustion. While she runs down a page line-by-line, he moves to the other end of the room to give her some space to work. He pulls off his shirt and climbs into bed in a pair of sweatpants, finding the small cot almost unmanageable, but exhaustion slams into him heavily, and he is practically asleep before his head hits the mattress. 

But he looks back at Peggy, catching her staring. She whips her head back, pretending to read her book again, but through the soulbond he can feel the attraction levels spike. He’d forgotten how she got around him, shirtless. 

After a beat, though, she forces herself back to reading again, this time for real. Steve sighs. He means to close his eyes for a second, just a second, but when Steve opens them again, hours have passed. Peggy’s changed into a nightgown, but still neglecting sleep in favor of the notebook.

“Peg,” he breathes out thickly, still half asleep. “C’mon, Peg. You need rest.”

She must be tired because there’s no argument. There’s a moment where he can hear the rustle of paper, but then Peggy is standing, crossing the room to the vacant cot. Soon he’s hearing the scape of metal being pushed across the floor. Her bed hits his. 

“For heat,” she tells him primly, entirely unabashed, climbing onto the adjoining bed.

He knows her body runs just as hot as his, but he isn’t about to argue. He’s thrilled when she settles beside him, and he slides back to make more room for her. It takes several tries before she arranges the blankets around them to her satisfaction, but Steve just stares up at her as she moves, diligent and focused on even the smallest of tasks. 

God, he’s missed her.

“Goodnight,” she tells him, using his chest as a pillow. “Sweet dreams.”

He presses closer to her, taking in a deep breath, inhaling her scent and sighing it back out with contentment. “I don’t think that’ll be much of an issue tonight.”

She smiles sleepily at him like he said something right. 

She’s asleep before he is, but it’s a near thing. He slips into slumber to the rise and fall of Peggy’s head on his chest, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he sleeps a deep peaceful dreamless sleep. When he finally stirs awake after a couple of hours, the sound of rain gently smattering down against the roof overhead is the only thing he can hear. Peggy is still knocked out, dark wavy hair splayed out across his chest, warm and relaxed. He drags his hand through her hair, curls tangling around his knuckles, and he can’t quite explain why the simple gesture gets to him, maybe it’s the memory of how he used to do that while making love to her, but sheer red-blooded desire runs through him.

A few hazy moments pass, and that’s when he feels her stir, either because of the bond or the hardening press against her hip. Dark eyelashes flutter open, and then she’s peering up at him silently, lips parted and pink. The tension between them shivers, waiting. He swallows thickly when she places a hand against his bare chest to push herself upright. His chest feels inexplicably tight, and he’s dragging air into his lungs while he looks up at her and she’s so goddamn beautiful. 

“Steve,” she stutters out.

He closes his eyes because he told himself he’d be patient. He told himself he’d wait for her to make the first move. “I don’t want to rush you. I know you’ve been through a lot.”

There’s a long stretch of silence, and ultimately, he has to open his eyes to see what she’s thinking because all he can feel through the bond is his own desires parroted back to him. 

“I think,” she says softly, “we’ve waited long enough, don’t you?”

He’s never had any doubts about that, but he needs to be dead-certain about the tangible possibility in her words. “Are you sure?”

She slowly slips her hand up across his chest and cups the base of his neck, bending her head to kiss him. With a singular, unrepentant demand her mouth takes over his in a kiss that leaves no room for him to doubt her assurances. Her fingers bury lazily through his hair as she shifts lower on his body, tongue roaming, with just a hint of a bite on his lower lips. He groans. 

She’s already rocking her body against his, teasing friction driving him mad, and he pushes up, wrapping an arm around her waist, the other cupping her ass as he squeezes it. He keeps touching her because he can, because he needs to, because he’s been stopping himself with gritted teeth since first finding her collapsed on his carpeted floor. His hands find the hem of her nightgown and he’s drawing it up and off, curls collapsing back onto her naked shoulders as he drops the material to the floor. 

She’s not wearing a brassiere underneath it, her gorgeous breasts exposed, nipples hardening against the splash of cool air. He drags his mouth across her breasts, his tongue and lips suckling at the swells between the valley, before taking the weight of one curve fully into his mouth. Her back arcs like a bow into his touch, releasing this dark strangled little moan while pulling heavily on his hair. He gets her panties down and loses it somewhere near her feet, and he’s so hard, her hips moving restlessly while he kisses her.

“Steve,” she whimpers, fumbling to take off his sweatpants. He drags his thumb across her bottom lip, soothing her with open-mouthed kisses across her chest, and she’s breathing heavy against him, her hips rising and rotating against his hardness, and he pushes up against her just as eagerly. “Steve, _please,_ ” she begs, and it’s that more than anything that gets him to move her off to the side so he can divest himself of his pants.

He’s on top of her almost immediately after, and he can’t believe he’s doing this; that he has her in his arms again, that she’s here with him after being gone for so long. He pulls away from her soft gorgeous skin to kiss her on the mouth, hard and wet. She writhes underneath him and he pins her hands down to the mattress on either side, listening to her breathe shakily, releasing these strangled sounds so much better than any fantasy he’s ever had. He wants this to be good for her, wants her screaming for it, wants her screaming _his name_ for it.

He pushes inside of her desperately, rather impolitely, rocking his hips into hers, and her mouth falls open, head rolling back, exposing a long clean line of her neck so that he can press kisses into it. He still wears his dog tags after all this time, the old stubborn habit from his days at the war not quite for the reason most people would suspect; the truth is he never takes it off because they still display his soulmark identification. He doesn't have a ring on his finger, but this is a way for the world to see he’s been taken, a way to keep Peggy close to his chest at all times, even when she felt a thousand years away. The dog tags land with small clinks against her collarbone with each push, and he's dragging in air like he can't breathe, can't think. Her fingers dig into his back, sharp pressure points that mark his body as he pushes back into her.

The intensity is startling, blindingly so, and Steve tries desperately to control the rhythm, but it sets itself while he slides, hot and solid, inside of her, in and out, in and out. The cots that they’re using start sliding apart as he thrusts, and for one blistering second Steve seriously wonders if they’ll hold, but the creaking metal warns him there’s no doubt, the brass buckling a second before they collapse to the ground; his reflexes work swiftly, wrapping an arm around her, twisting them around so Peggy is flung on top; he lands hard on his shoulder and back while the cots breaks apart around them.

“Are you okay?” he grunts against her shoulder, laying on the ground.

She looks down, dazed, eyes still heavily dilated, not quite comprehending what had happened. She nods her head, unhurt, stuttering out, _“no, keep going, keep going. Don’t stop,”_ while slanting her hips in encouragement.

He doesn’t need to be told twice, rocking his body up into hers. She whimpers out his name, eyes slamming shut. He drags her mouth back to him, and she makes this sound, this fucking greedy little moan while her body tightens around him, and he has to press his forehead against hers to keep the rhythm hard and fast because he knows she’s close, can feel her coming over the bond, can feel her desperation. Then she’s seizing around his cock, tremors working through her body and onto his, and Steve barks, getting off at the same time, feeling himself come in short jerking releases. 

Before he’s even quite fully done, she’s saying, “I think we broke your safehouse.” 

He’d laugh but he needs a moment, still coming down from the rush, feeling oxygen return to his lungs like he’s still an asthmatic kid having run the mile. Somehow, they’ve ended up on the other side of the room, the broken remnants of the cot scattered around them.

“Hey,” she murmurs to him, softly.

“Hello back,” he replies, his voice feeling raspy. 

He tucks a strand of hair back behind her ear, and kisses her hungrily.

#

“What did you mean by you’re no longer Captain America?”

The words are spoken softly into the cold light of the day, but to Steve it feels rather calamitous to the general atmosphere of carefree affection hanging around. He pulls her closer to her, the splay of his hand stretching out to cover the expanse of her naked back, settling her more firmly on his chest. He stares up the ceiling and tries to find an answer that won’t ruin the mood, but he owes her the truth.

“I just didn’t see the point anymore,” he answers, gruffly. “The war was over. You were gone. It felt like the world had outgrown the use of Captain America.”

“No offense, darling, but that might be one of the most ignorant things I’ve ever heard in my very long and complicated life. The world could always use a good man in the fight.”

“I’m still fighting,” he insists. “Just without the shield and the get-up.”

“Yes, well, I happen to be a fan of the get-up," she says, with a dark, hooded look that would have left him blushing if they weren't naked in bed already. "And the shield is all yours, once more.”

He lifts his eyebrow at her. “You don’t want to keep it? At this point, it’s been yours far longer than it’s been mine.”

She smiles up at him, shaking her head. “It didn’t matter how long I had it. I always thought of it as yours. I’ll be the more than happy to relinquish it to its rightful owner. If you ever decide you want to take that mantle back?”

He pauses, for the first time in years genuinely considering it. “Can I think on it?”

“Of course,” she answers. “We have a lot to think about in the coming days. Too much.”

That much is true. They have a thousand and one things to figure out. The Blood Brothers’ quest for the Super Soldier Serum will be an immediate concern, but he’s strangely not worried about that anymore. They’ll figure it out. 

The larger questions plague him. Her secrets, her foreknowledge. The cover for her reappearance and reintroduction into the world as his soulbond, if they even want that. Maybe they’ll give her a new name? A new identity to avoid the press? Maybe she’ll come out swinging as Captain Britain while he plops his feet up on a desk and cheers? Maybe they dance together, have that quiet wedding she promised? 

Maybe they’ll finally hold still for a moment and enjoy the peace?

Here the thing he's never told anyone: Steve Rogers never plans for the future. It's too uncertain, he’s found, too perilous to hope for something when he has a life as chaotic as this. Some lives are destined to be tumultuous, bound up in carnage, some from the onset, others volunteered at a young age. He’d been naïve and stupid when he’d said yes to Erskine’s program, but it had a way of bringing Peggy into his life, and for all the bloodshed he’d seen, all the horrors of war, the horrors of men, he knows it’s been more good than bad. Peggy tips it in his favor. 

He could worry about the past, he could worry about the future, but all he wants is to put that burden down from time to time and focus on the periods of peace and stillness. If he can do that, maybe he can get through this? A lot of the questions about destiny or fate or purpose —he doubts they’ll ever get answers anyway.

They’ll work together, he knows. They’ll save civilians, fight the bad guys where they can, set out on missions that others would deem suicidal. When the time comes, far into the distant future, he’ll fight alongside another Peggy once more when she wakes up to a world unknown. He’ll pull his weight, do everything in his considerable power to be there for her. It’ll be hard. It’ll be painful, but it’ll be worth it. For better or worse, he knows he’s signing up for a lifetime of it with Peggy. Several lifetimes.

Because one thing he knows for certain: he couldn’t have chosen a better partner.

#

Fin.


End file.
